Rebellion in the Backlands 9780226124452

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Rebellion in the Backlands (os SERTOES) By EUCLIDES DA CUNHA TRANSLATBD BY

SAMUEL PUTNAM

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO &

LONDON

Translated by permission from the edition published by Livraria Francisco Alves, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London ©1944 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published 1944. Printed in United States of America ISBN: 0-226-12444-4 LCN: A44-346 030201

15 16 17

§ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the America National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-l984.

T

"BRAZIL'S GREATEST BOOK": A TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

HERE can be no doubt that Euclides da Cunha's Os SertOes 1 is a work that is unique not only in Brazilian but in world literature as well. In no other instance, probably, has there been such unanimity on the part of critics of all shades of opinion in acclaiming a book as the greatest and most distinctive which a people has produced, the most deeply expressive of that people's spirit. On this the native and the foreign critic are in agreement. "Nosso livro supremo-our finest book," says Agrippino Grieco, in his study of "The Evolu tion of Brazilian Prose," and he adds that it is "the work which best reflects our land and our people.'" Stefan Zweig, Brazil's tragic guest, saw in Os Sertoes a "great national epic .... created purely by chance," one giving "a complete psychological picture of the Brazilian soil, the people, and the country, such as has never been achieved with equal insight and psychological comprehension. Comparable in world literature, perhaps, to The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in which Lawrence describes the struggle in the desert, this great epic, little known in other countries, is destined to outlive countless books that are famous today by its dramatic magnificence, its spectacular wealth of spiritual wisdom, and the wonderful humanitarian touch which is characteristic of the whole work. Althougli Brazilian literature today has made enormous progress with the number of its writers and poets and its linguistic subtlety, no other book has reached such supremacy."3 "The Bible of Brazilian nationality," as it has been termed,4 Os SertOes has "enriched Brazil with a book laden with seed, filled with perspectives for our triumph in the world of culture."s It is commonly looked upon as marking, in the year I

[Cf. ibid.)

THE ASSAULT

379

that of leaving behind them in the shortest possible time this brutal desert region of the backlands. Terror and a sense of their own wretchedness ended by overcoming the fatigue of the journey; it had a galvanic effect on them, desperately hurling them onward down that endless road, onward, onward. There was no longer any trace of military formation in their ranks. For the most part, through a process of adaptation, they had come to adopt the garb of the sertanejos and were no longer to be distinguished by their faded uniforms hanging on them in shreds. Instead, they now wore true sandals on their feet, cotton shirts on their backs, with no caps or military bonnets but leather hats; all of which gave them the appearance of "quitters" with their families, thronging pell-mell to the coast, under the lash of the drought. This illusion was heightened by the presence among them of a few women, soldiers' mistresses, witchlike old camp followers with ghastly, wrinkled faces. Distinguished officers, General Savaget, Colonels Telles and Nery, and others, returning sick or wounded from the front, upon passing through the midst of these bands were greeted with a painful indifference. The men did not salute them. These were less unfortunate comrades-in-arms, no more. They passed through and were quickly lost from sight in the distance, leaving clouds of dust behind them; but they were followed by sharp and menacing looks on the part of those who, scarcely able to conceal their feelings, envied them their fast-trotting horses. After four days on the road, the more fortunate ones finally reached the point where the Rosario, Monte Santo, and Calumby highways come together, at the farmhouse known as "Joa," another mud hut on the slope of a hill shaded by tall joaz trees, with the highland plains stretching away in the distance. They now felt safe. One day more would bring them to "Caldeirao Grande,"33 the best ranch in these parts, an almost lordly dwelling, built upon a broad hillock with a well-stored reservoir down below, fed by the dammed-up waters of a creek. Here within a radius of a few miles the landscape was transformed. Round about them now were small knolls bordered with a vegetation that was much livelier; and the wayfarers for a few hours were able to escape the saddening obsession of sterile plains and devastated mountains. 34 They were now very near to the so-called "base of operations." The next day they set out for Monte Santo; and, after two hours on the road, 33

[Literally, the "Big Cauldron"; on caldeiriio as applied to a water pit or reservoir see p.

II.] 34

[Cf. pp. 198--99.]

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS their spirits were revived by a glimpse of the small town, two and a half miles distant. It was a pleasant sight as it lay there amid the broad sweep of the tablelands-a cluster of little houses running up a gently inclined terrace to the foot of the steep-rising mountain. Perched on the summit up above, the chapel, gleaming white against the blue of the sky, appeared to be nodding them a friendly and affectionate welcome. Their hopes, however, were short lived. Upon reaching Monte Santo, they found that they were still in the desert. This city of the dead, uninhabited, wholly unprovisioned, could give them shelter for little more than a day. The population had abandoned it, "ducking into the caatinga," in the woodman's expressive phrase, frightened off at once by the jagun~o and by the soldiery. A small garrison was quartered in the humble village square and there spent its days in idleness, in a marking of time that was more unbearable than battles and forced marches. What was supposed to be a military hospital had been-set up in a low, dark, but spacious dwelling; but this was a place that the sick and wounded dreaded; it merely added to their tortures. This village with its narrow, winding alleys, bearing sonorous names-"Moreira Cesar Street," "Captain Salomao Street"! -was merely an aggravation in a region where all nature was hostile; it was the desert within walls, lost in the maze of filthy little passageways, filled with detritus and with the offal of battalions that had camped there; it was more unpleasant than the desert itself, which at least was purified by suns and swept by cleansing winds. Upon arriving in the town, the wayfarers, fleeing the unwelcome proximity of the bats which infested the abandoned houses, proceeded to camp out in the one square the village afforded, large and quadrangular in shape, where they disputed for the shade of the old tamarind tree that stood alongside the fair booth.ls The next day they quickly left the place, every man for himself, striking out in the direction of Queimadas. This meant another long and exhausting journey across the desert; for Queimadas was forty miles away, six or eight more days of bitter hardship beneath t}.e scorching sun, relieved only by the inevitable halts at the water pits: at Quirinquinqua, a couple of gloomy dwellings, surrounded by silent-standing mandacaru trees and built upon a broad ledge of exposed granite; at Cansan~ao, a tiny hamlet, a dozen houses with stagnant pools all around; at "Serra Branca," which put one in mind of a pack-drivers' ranch, festive in appearance, shaded by leafy urucuris; at the "]acuricy"in fact, at all the lakes and pools with their greenish, ugly-looking water. IS

[See p.

200.)

THE ASSAULT DEPREDATIONS

The country along the roadside, which up to then had been populated, was now turned into a waste land, as these tumultuous bands stormed through it, leaving destruction in their wake, like the remnants of some caravan of limping savages. Anguish-ridden and rebellious, menacing groups of the sick and wounded, uttering cries and imprecations to make one's hair stand on end, would descend upon the huts along the highway, demanding an unconditional hospitality of the inmates. First, an angry request, not so much a threat as expressive of irritation. Then an open assault. The quiet, peaceful life which the backwoodsmen led in these humble dwellings, in contrast to their own tormented existence, goaded them on to such acts, inspiring in them an irresistible impulse to destruction which was hypnotic in character-leading them to batter down the doors with their rifle butts, as the terrified backlands family fled to the safety of the nearest weed patch. CONFLAGRATIONS

Then-·for it was necessary to find some stupidly dramatic diversion to distract them for a moment from their deep-seated agony-they would hurl lighted firebrands on the roofs thatched with Sape,36 which would instantly go up in flames. The strong gusts of the northeaster would scatter the sparks over the dried and withered foliage of the caatinga; and, within a short space of time, swiftly kindled conflagrations which it was impossible to extinguish would spread for many miles around, lashed by the wind, spiraling upward in clouds of smoke and flame, as they rolled down the ravines, encircling and engulfing the slopes and hilltops with the glow of volcanic craters that had suddenly erupted. Safe now from the enemy, the fugitives were only able to endure this last stage of their painful journey by resorting to misdemeanors of this sort, thereby broadening the circle of devastation wrought by the war, as they made for the coast. Spurred to evil by their wretchedness, they inspired at once both pity and hate-cruelly victimized and victimizing others in their turn. They reached Queimadas a few at a time, utterly exhausted, all but dying; and from there they took the train down to Baia. FIRST DEFINITE TIDINGS

Their coming was awaited with great curiosity and anxiety. At last, the first victims of the conflict were returning, that conflict which had gripped the attention of the entire country. The arrival of these unfortu)6

[A fernlike Brazilian plant (polypody).J

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS nate heroes was viewed by a huge throng which filled the Cal~ada railway terminal, overflowing into the near-by streets all the way to Fort Jequitaia. The people had never thought to witness so dramatic a spectacle as this, and they experienced emotions which they had never felt before. The wounded had arrived in a wretched state; and that repulsive backwash of the campaign which had been rolling along the hinterland trails now spread out through city streets, an ugly wave of rags and human carcasses. It was a heartbreaking procession. Officers and soldiers alike, leveled now in their misery, with all distinctions of rank gone, were clad in the same nondescript raiment: old socks strung together to form indifferent loincloths; tattered shirts; ragged dolmans on their shoulders; overcoats in shreds, draped over flabby chests-all this made a tragic picture indeed. As they hobbled along, dragging themselves on crutches, stumbling, falling, their hollow cheeks and drooping shoulders told their own story, the deeply moving story of this campaign, which now for the first time was to be seen for what it was, in these weak and mutilated bodies, gashed by bullets and by the thorns of the caatinga. And they kept on coming, hundreds of them every day: on the sixth of August, 26 officers and 216 men; on the eighth, 150; on the eleventh, 400; on the twelfth, 260; on the fourteenth, 270; on the eighteenth, 53; etc. The population of the capital received them with deep emotion. As always happens, individual impressions were caught up in the collective reaction, which, with many persons experiencing the same feelings, thus became the exponent of individual sentiment; with all hearts beating as one, all were affected by the same contagion, the same suggestive images, and all individualities were merged in the ennobling anonymity of a pitying multitude, the like of which has seldom been seen in history. The vast city now became one huge home. On every hand, patriotic committees were organized to collect donations, which were numerous, constant, and spontaneous. In the Arsenal of War, in the Medical School, in the hospitals, and even in the religious houses infirmaries were set up; and in each one of these the mutilated heroes were placed under the patronage of some illustrious name: Esmarck, Claude Bernard, Duplay, or Pasteur never had a finer tribute from posterity. Without waiting for the government to act, the people constituted themselves the natural guardians of the patients, opening their homes to them, surrounding them with every attention, encouraging them, guiding their faltering steps in the street. On visiting days they invaded the hospitals in a body, silently-religiously. They would go up to the beds as if those were old friends that lay there. With the ones that were not too ill to converse, they would discuss the hardships

THE ASSAULT which the troops had endured, the dangerous episodes that had occurred; and after such expositions as they then received-the terrible story as told by these sick. and wounded men-they would leave feeling that they had at last a clear view of this, the most brutal conflict of our age. Inexplicable as it may seem, however, this profound and general commiseration was accompanied by a spirit of the most intense enthusiasm. These martyrs were given the ovations due to conquerors. This would happen on the spur of the moment, without previous arrangement-a quick, spontaneous, emphatic demonstration which was over in a quarter of an hour, and which was purely due to the intermittent play of unrestrained impulse. The days now were filled with the movements of noisy crowds, storming in the streets and squares, shouting and laughing, weeping and wailing, which was their way of paying solemn tribute to the nation's heroes. The wounded were a painful revelation, certainly, but, in a manner, an inspiring one. In them was to be seen the energy of a race. These men who had come back lacerated by the jagun!;o's claws and by the thorns of the earth represented the strength of a people who had been put to trial-the trial by sword, the trial by fire, and the trial by hunger. Shaken by the cataclysm of war, the superficial layers of nationality had brought to light the deep-lying elements in these resigned and stoic Titans. Above all, there was another thought in the minds of all, unspoken but nonetheless dominant; and that was one of admiration for the daring of those rude back.landers who had thus been able to cut to pieces whole battalions. It was all like a tonic for souls, and they took a deep, long draught of it. Vibrant with enthusiasm, they made pilgrimages to the Palma barracks, where Colonel Carlos Telles was lying wounded, and to J equitaia, where General Savaget was convalescing; and, when the latter officer was able to venture a few steps in the street, the entire commercial life of the Lower Town at once came to a standstill, as a huge and spontaneous ovation broke out, with the entire population in a short while gathered about the heroic leader of the Second Column, who thus, merely by making his appearance in the street, had transformed a common workday into a natjonal holiday. LOSSES

These demonstrations were daily interrupted by irritating details. The full extent of the disaster was at length known, with arithmetic exactitude, and it was amazing. From June 25, the day on which the first shots were exchanged with the enemy, down to August 10, the expedition's losses had totaled 2,049. The official charts made this plain. The First Column had

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS started with 1,171 men; the Second, with 878. The figures, respectively, were as follows: Firsl CoZumn.-Artillery: 9 officers and 47 men wounded; 2 officers and I2 men killed; cavalry wing: 4 officers and 46 men wounded; 30 officers and 16 men killed; engineers: 1 officer and 3 men wounded; 1 private killed; police corps: 6 officers and 46 men wounded; 3 officers and 24 men killed; Fifth Battalion of Infantry: 4 officers and 66 men wounded; I officer and 25 men killed; Seventh Battalion: 8 officers and 95 men wounded; 5 officers and 52 men killed; Ninth Battalion: 6 officers and 59 men wounded; 2 officers and 22 men killed; Fourteenth Battalion: 8 officers and II9 men wounded; S officers and 42 men killed; Fifteenth Battalion: 5 officers and 30 men wounded; 10 privates killed; Sixteenth Battalion: 5 officers and 24 men wounded; 10 privates killed; Twenty-fifth Battalion: 9 officers and 134 men wounded; 3 officers and S5 men killed; Twenty-seventh Battalion: 6 officers and 45 men wounded; 24 privates killed; Thirtieth Battalion: 10 officers and 120 men wounded; 4 officers and 35 men killed. Second CoZumn.-0ne general killed; Artillery: I officer killed; Twelfth Battalion of Infantry: 6 officers and 126 men wounded; I officer and 50 men killed; Twenty-sixth Battalion: 6 officers and 36 men wounded; 2 officers and 22 men killed; Thirtyfirst Battalion: 7 officers and 99 men wounded; 4 officers and 48 men killed; Thirty-second Battalion: 6 officers and 62 men wounded; 4 officers and 31 men killed; Thirtysecond Battalion:37 10 officers killed and 65 men wounded; I officer and 15 men killed; Thirty-fourth Battalion: 4 officers and 91 men wounded; 1 officer and 22 men killed; Fortieth Battalion: 9 officers and 75 men wounded; 2 officers and 30 men killed.

And still the casualties kept coming in, a daily average of eight. The enemy, on the other hand, appeared to have extraordinary resources at his disposal. VARIOUS VERSIONS AND LEGENDS

Those resources, the truth is, were being grossly exaggerated by overexcited imaginations. The federal senate had also been affected by the wave of general commotion and had made a vehement demand for enlightenment with regard to a rumored shipment of arms to Buenos Aires, reported to be destined for the ports of Santos and BaJa, everything pointing to the supposition that these were intended for the "Conselheiristas," or followers of the Counselor. An incident such as this, result of the widespread neurasthenia, came as a climax to all the imaginings on the subject which had been going the rounds and, accordingly, embroidered upon in the telling, took on the aspect of reality. What the American Republics were thinking was shown by the news items that were being printed in their most serious organs of the press, and which, appearing to justify such a rumor as the one just mentioned, merely added to the general hysteria. The paper that perhaps carries most weight of any in South America,38 after having related the curious 17 [There is apparently a mistake here, two sets of figures being given for the Thirty-sec· ond. The text of the sixteenth Brazilian edition has been followed.)

38 La NadIn of Buenos Aires, issue of July 30.

THE ASSAULT

events of the campaign, added certain details of a strange and dreadful portent: It is a matter of two missives which, within two days' time, we have received from the "Buenos Aires Section of the International Union of the Friends of the Brazilian Empire," informing us, by order of the Executive Committee in New York City, that the said Union has a reserve force of not less than 15,000 men in the state of Baia alone, by way of reinforcing the army of the fanatics in case of necessity; and in addition to this, 100,000 in various northern states of Brazil, and another 67,000 at various points in the United States of North America, all of them ready to leave at a moment's notice for the shores of the former empire, and all of them well armed and well prepared for war. "We also have," the missives state, "arms of the most modem make, munitions, and an abundance of money." The inscription and signature on these enigmatic communications, which are well written, with good penmanship and correct orthography, is in an ink which recalls the violaceous hue of the dead, the capitals being set off with vermilion-colored ink, the color of blood. In the presence of this formidable array of men and arms, as pictured for us by the mysterious "friends of the Empire," we are at a loss whether to ascribe the communications in question to one of those terrible associations whose plans for destruction are forged in darkness or to certain gentlemen who may be given to mystifying their neighbors. Meanwhile, whatever may be at the bottom of all this, we hereby announce and acknowledge receipt of the said missives.

All this was believed. Out there in that territory aflame with rebellion, the Fourth Expedition was cut off and on the brink of catastrophe. This was on good authority. From the municipality of Itapicuru alone, it was asserted, three thousand fanatics had set out for Canudos, led by a padre who, straying from orthodox principles, was going out to share the abstruse follies of the schismatic. Through Barroca thousands of armed ruffians had passed, all bound in the same direction. The names of these new rebel leaders were mentioned, clownish names, like those of Chouans: "Peter the Invisible," "Joe the Buck," "Bear's Noodle," and others of the same sort. To aggravate these conjectures, there came news that was true enough. The sertanejos were scattering throughout the backlands in bold sallies. Led on by "Bold Anthony," they had attacked the territory of Mirandella; they had stormed, taken, and sacked the town of Sant' Anna do Brejo, and were here, there, and everywhere. The scope of the campaign was now enlarged, and it was evident that the jagun~os were pursuing a definite line of tactics. In addition to the settlement, they had two new positions that were first rate from the point of view of defense, and which were well manned; these were the chaotic slopes of Caypan and the row of low hills about the river plain known as the Varzea da Ema. Surging out from Canudos, the insurrection was in this manner spreading along the

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS sides of an enormous triangle, capable of inclosing fifty thousand bayonets. The rebellion was growing. The supply trains which set out from Monte Santo, even though reinforced not by battalions but by brigades, had an eventful march and were constantly assaulted. When they reached Aracaty, it was indispensable to send to Canudos for two or three battalions to come out and escort them into camp. That sinister stretch of road between "Vicar's Farm" and "Baixas" was enough to strike terror to the hearts of the bravest of veterans. This was the classic scene for the stampeding of herds and the dispersing of pack trains, by suddenly opening a heavy fire upon them, driving the platoons back in precipitate flight. In the course of these successive encounters, deliberately staged with the object of disturbing the line of march, our troops after a while began to descry a new variety of jagunco, one who, motivated by other reasons, was lending indirect aid to the enemy. They would catch sight of him among the clearings where the branches were thin, darting swiftly here and there in the headlong manner of guerrilla fighters; and then they would see the gleam of buttons from a soldier's uniform, a flash of crimson-colored socks. The famished deserter was attacking his former comrades. This was a lamentable symptom, adding yet another trait to a campaign whose aspect was becoming all the time more grave as one trivial event after another added up to a dismaying sum. The disabled soldiers, who were in constant contact with the people, conversing with them daily, had set themselves up as the rude chroniclers of events; and, however imaginative and naive may have been the form in which they narrated them, their tales were true in essence, even though marred by exaggerations. Out of them, strange episodes were woven; and, as a result, the jagun~o now began to appear as a being apart, teratological. and monstrous, half-man and half-goblin; violating all biological laws by displaying an inconceivable power of resistance; daringly attacking his adversary, yet himself unseen, intangible; slipping away invisibly through the caatinga, like a cobra.; gliding or tumbling down the sides of steep cliffs like a specter; yet lighter than the musket that he bore; lean, dried up, fantastic, melting into a sprite, weighing less than a child, his bronzed skin stretched tautly over his bones, rough as the epidermis of a mummy. The popular imagination from then on ran riot, in a drunken delirium of stupendous happenings, woven out of fantasies. Some of these anecdotes were brief and to the point, affording a keen insight into the character of this indomitable hunter of armies.

THE ASSAULT "LONG LIVE THE GOOD JESUS!"

In one of the skirmishes following the assault on the settlement a young curiboca was taken prisoner, who to all the questions put to him automatically replied, with a proud indifference, "I don't know!" Finally, he was asked how he wished to die. "By shooting!" "But it's going to be the knife," was the soldier's terrible answer. And so it was. And, as the blade grated dully through the cartilages of his throat and the blood gushed forth, his last gurgling cry was: "Long live the Good Jesus!" AN EPIC INCIDENT

Other of these tales took on epic proportions. On the first of July the eldest son of Joaquim Macambira,39 a lad of eighteen, came up to the wily chieftain. "Dad, I want to put the 'Killer'40 out of commission!" The crafty old warrior, a kind of rude, copper-colored imam,41 gazed at him without any show of emotion. "See the Counselor about it-and go ahead." So, the bold lad set out with eleven picked companions. After making their way across the Vasa-Barris, which was "cut off" into pools,42 they climbed the undulating slope of Mount Favella and glided through the denuded caatingas with the sinuous movement of cobras. It was midday, and the sun was beating down upon the earth, its vertical, ardent rays penetrating even to the bottom of the deepest grottoes, and casting no shadow anywhere. In these parts, midday is a more silent and witching hour than is midnight itself. Shining through the layers of exposed rock, reflected by the barren plains, and refracted by the hard, parched ground, all the heat of earth flows back, tripled in intensity, into space, in mounting columns of incandescent and irrespirable air. An absolute quiet lies upon the enervated landscape, and not the faintest breeze is stirring. There is not a wingbeat on the air, whose transparency next the ground is disturbed by swift and bubbling waves of heat. The fauna of the caatingas, hidden away, is taking its noontide repose. The withered branches of the trees, stripped of their bark, hang motionless. Unable to withstand the heat, the army on the mountaintop also was taking its ease. Sprawled at random here and there along the slopes, their bonnets down over their faces to shade them from the sun, the soldiers "See pp. 58, 342.

.0 [See p. 34

2 .)

.' See p. 158.

.. [Cf. p. 19.)

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS were sleeping, or were thinking of their distant firesides, as they snatched a few moments' respite by way of recuperating their strength for the exhausting battle soon to be resumed. Scattered over the hills opposite them was a multitude of tiny dwellings, huddled together in disorderly fashion, without streets or squares, a meaningless jumble of huts-this was Canudos, silent and deserted as some old abandoned farm site overrun with weeds. The army was taking its ease. Then, higher up where the artillery was stationed, there appeared above the creeping, tangled underbrush on the edge of the clearing a dozen faces with restless, roving, feline eyes darting swift glances all around. The faces of a dozen men lying hidden among the bromelia tufts. No one saw them; no one could see them, as they slowly rose, turning their backs with a sovereign indifference on the twenty peaceful battalions. There before them was the coveted prize. Like some fantastic animal ready for a sudden pounce, the Witworth 32 was poised on its solid base. Its truculent, bellowing mouth, which had hurled so many grenades on their holy churches, was turned toward "Bello Monte." The sun's rays, falling full on its gleaming black surface, caparisoned it with sparks, as the fanatics stood gazing at it for some little while. Then they sprang up from the edge of the clearing and fell upon it, assaulting it, grappling with it, attempting to strangle it. One of them carried a handspike, which he now raised in a quick, threatening gesture. The blow fell, a resounding one, loud and harsh. A cry of alarm then broke the silence that lay on every living thing, a cry that echoed down the gullies and ravines and over the hills and valleys, filling all space, as it seemed, with a thunderous reverberation, a cry of triumph and destruction that rocked the entire camp. The detachments hastily formed ranks, and in a second's time the assailants found themselves surrounded by swords and rifles, as the blows fell and the bullets rained down upon them from every side. One alone made his escape-a wounded, battered creature-by running, leaping, tumbling through the ranks of the excited troops; under a hail of bullets, through a deadly ring of bayonets, he ran, plunging into the weeds, dashing through them at a headlong pace, down the steep mountainsides, hanging perilously over chasms, free at last. 43 This and other incidents, representing a romantic exaggeration of the most trivial events, conferred upon the campaign an impressive legendary aspect which aroused the public of the old capital 44 and finally of the entire nation. 4J

(Cf. the account of this event given on p. 342.)

44

[Bafa.)

THE ASSAULT

III MORE REINFORCEMENTS

More energetic action on the part of the government was now imperatively demanded. As a result of the latest catastrophes apprehension was growing, along with the feeling that very little was known as to what was actually taking place. As always, there was a clash of opinions. The majority believed that the rebels had strong support behind them. That was evident. According to the orders of the day, couched in such heroic terms, they had been defeated; but they still were in a position to flee to the backlands of the Sao Francisco region; instead of which, they insisted upon remaining there in the settlement, where all escape would be cut off once the siege was rendered effective. It was really incomprehensible. From all of this certain grave and logical corollaries were deduced. Aside from the hypothesis of a superhuman degree of devotion such as would lead them to die en masse beneath the ruins of their consecrated temples, they must be possessed of formidable warlike qualities that bafHed all the regulation strategists. The number of those remaining in Canudos was said to have diminished, but this, surely, was a trap to keep the army fighting there in futile skirmishes while the enemy assembled strong forces at other points for a final assault all along the line, with the besiegers thus caught between two lines of fire. There were, on the other hand, opinions that were more encouraging. Colonel Carlos Telles, in a letter to the newspapers, stated clearly that the number of jagun~s had been reduced to two hundred able-bodied men, possibly without any resources whatsoever, the fanatics being provisioned and equipped with what they had taken from previous expeditions. However, this optimism on the part of one of the heroes of the conflict, an optimism which, to tell the truth, was exaggerated, had little effect on the general incredulity. All the facts were against it, especially those daily irruptions of wounded men, which added to the ever growing feeling of alarm all over the country. THE GIRARD BRIGADE

But there were other disasters to come. In response to General Arthur Oscar's first request for reinforcements, the government had promptly organized an auxiliary brigade which, unlike other bodies of its kind, was not to be distinguished merely by a meaningless numeral but, in accordance with a laudable custom not current among us, by which a commander's renown is shed upon his command, was to have a name-the Girard Brigade. It was commanded by General Miguel Maria Girard and was made up of three units taken from the garrison of the federal capital: the

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS Twenty-second, commanded by Colonel Bento Thomaz Gn~alves; the Twenty-fourth, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Raphael Tobias; and the Thirty-eighth, commanded by Colonel Philomeno Jose da Cunha. There were, in all, 1,042 men and 68 officers, perfectly equipped, with a magnificent supply of cartridges-8so,ooo of them-for the insatiable maw of backlands warfare. However, through a combination of circumstances which it would take too long to relate here, in place of being an "auxiliary" force, this one turned out to be a liability. It set out from Rio de Janeiro under command of the leader whose name it bore and proceeded as far as Queimadas, which it reached on July 31. It set out from Queimadas on August 3 under the command of a colonel and marched to Monte Santo. It departed from Monte Santo for Canudos on August 10, commanded by a major. 4$ Meanwhile, it had left behind in Bafa a colonel and a number of other officers who were sick.. In Queimadas it left a general, a lieutenant colonel, and still other officers-likewise sick.. In Monte Santo it left a colonel and more officers, all of whom were sick.. STRANGE HEROISM

The brigade went to pieces along the road. From its ranks there now came requests for discharge that were more alarming than the annihilation of whole divisions. An exceptional kind of beri-beri had laid hold of the men, one that called not for the physician's skill but for the attention of astute psychologists. The simple truth of the matter is that fear on this occasion had its own great heroes, men so stupendously brave that they were willing to announce to the entire country that they were cowards. It was as they left Queimadas for the back.lands that these troops first encountered the throngs of wounded men returning from the front. General Savaget, Colonel Nery, Major Cunha Mattos, Captain Chacha Pereira, and other officers had passed through their encampment at "Contendas," and had been given an enthusiastic greeting, officers and men lining up alongside the road to salute. But, after that, their fervor began to die down. After a march of only three days, they were already beginning to suffer privations; for they had seen their supply of rations dwindling with each successive group of wounded that they encountered and with whom they had shared their provisions; and it was in a state of exhaustion and deep dejection that they finally arrived at Monte Santo. 45

Henrique J* de Magalhles.

THE ASSAULT

39 1

EN ROUTE TO CANUDOS

The brigade took the road for Canudos, where it was anxiously being awaited, on the tenth of August, wholly deprived now of the resplendent hierarchy of officers with which it had started. It was now commanded by the commissary of the Twenty-fourth, Henrique de Magalhaes, the battalions being under the command of Major Lydio Porto and Captains Affonso de Oliveira and Tito Escobar. Their march was a slow and arduous one. From Queimadas on, they encountered serious difficulties with regard to transport; their draft animals, old, worn-out mules, castaways that they had picked up in Billa, with drivers that had been impressed into service, went limping and stumbling down the road, holding up the troops and slowing their advance. In this fashion they arrived at Aracaty, where a supply train was turned over to them which they were to escort to Canudos. In the meantime their ranks had been depleted by smallpox, with two or three cases daily being sent back to the hospital at Monte Santo. Others, crippled by the sudden transition from the paved streets of the capital to these rugged trails, straggled behind and were lost in the rear, where they mingled with the wounded who were bound in the opposite direction. It was accordingly providential that, as they passed through "Juet~" on August 14, they should have made contact with the Fifteenth Battalion of Infantry, already hardened in backlands warfare, which had been sent out from Canudos to meet them. For on the following day, after they had left "Baixas," where they had halted the evening before to permit a large number of stragglers to catch up with them, they were violently attacked at "Vicar's Farm." From a trench along the side, overlooking the highway, the jagun~os fell upon their right flank, firing on them all along the line. A sublieutenant of the Twenty-fourth, who was with the advance guard, and another of the Thirty-eighth, who was in the rear, were killed, along with a number of men in the ranks. Taken by surprise and terrified in the presence of these fierce warriors, some of the platoons were thrown into hopeless confusion, with the majority of the soldiers firing desperately at random. The bugles blew, and their loud and vibrant notes were intermingled with shouts of command. The frightened draft animals broke loose and fled, and the oxen stampeded, plunging into the caatinga. The Fifteenth Battalion,46 which was in the van, did its best to stay the wavering line, but the enemy was not repulsed, and the rear guard, upon passing this same point, was in its tum attacked. With regard to this de46

Commanded by Captain Gomes Carneiro.

39 2

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS

feat, for that is what it was, it will be sufficient to state that, of the 102 oxen which they were convoying, only I I remained. At "Angico" the brigade was once more attacked, and, after making a nominal bayonet charge in which not a man was lost, it finally entered Canudos, where the hardened warriors, tyrannically disciplined by being under fire every day, greeted it with the nickname of "pretty brigade," a sobriquet which, thanks to its brave officers, it was later to shed, along with the name originally bestowed upon it.

IV STILL MORE REINFORCEMENTS

By the time the news of this attack reached Baia, it had assumed the proportions of a battle lost, adding one more shock to the state of emotional unbalance that prevailed and half-a-dozen more rumors to the maze of conjectures. Then it was that the government began to act with the urgency demanded by the situation. Realizing the inefficacy of the reinforcements it had recently sent out, it began to form a new division by assembling the last of the battalions, scattered through the states, that were capable of a rapid mobilization. And, in order that it might have a firsthand view of the matter, it dispatched to the scene of operations one of its members, the Secretary of State for Affairs of War,47 Marshal Carlos Machado de Bittencourt. The latter set out for Baia in August, as fresh fighting forces were being mustered in all comers of the country. The movement to take up arms now suddenly became general, assuming the form of mass levies. From the far north and from the far south the troops kept coming, their numbers increased by the police corps of Sao Paulo, Para, and Amazonas. The Paulista, reminiscent of the adventurous bandeirante of old, the bold horseman from Rio Grande, the curiboca from the northeast with whom few can compare in hardihood, all now were bearing down on the ancient metropolisj4 8 men from the most diverse regions, of varying characters and temperaments, customs and ethnic tendencies, from the dark mestizo to the swarthy cabodo, marching alongside the white man, were united in the bonds of a common aspiration. And the former capital, nestling within its age-old bastions, greeted with a warm and glowing affection these wandering sons of hers-wandering for three whole centuries. Long dispersed, the various factors of our race, beautifully intermingled, were of a sudden returning to their point of departure. Baia decked herself out to receive them. Transfigured by the flux and reflux of the campaign47

[Secretario de Estado dos Negocios da Guerra.)

48

[Bafa.J

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martyrs arriving, fighters departing-she laid aside her habitual apathy and assumed once more the warlike appearance of bygone times. Her useless fortresses, which, like the middle-class houses that lined her streets, had fallen into decay, were now quickly put in repair and, when the trees that grew from their crevices had been felled, underwent a resurrection to the light of day, recalling the time when from those battlements the long bronze culverins had thundered. It was in the old fortifications that the recently arrived contingents were quartered: the First Police Battalion of Sao Paulo, with 21 officers and 458 men, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Joaquim Elesb8.o dos Reis; and the Twenty-ninth, Thirty-ninth, Thirty-seventh, Twentyeighth, and Fourth battalions, commanded by Colonel J08.0 Cesar de Sampaio, Lieutenant Colonels Jose da Cruz, Firmino Lopes Rego, and Antonio Bernardo de Figueiredo, and Major Frederico Mara. These battalions had a strength, respectively, of 27 officers and 240 men; 40 officers and 250 men; 51 officers and 322 men; I I officers, in addition to 36 sublieutenants who had been added, and 250 men; and I I officers (all sublieutenants) and 219 men-this last battalion, the Fourth, had neither captains nor lieutenants. And, finally, there were two additional police corps: the police regiment of Para, with a fighting strength of 640, commanded by Colonel Jose Sotero de Menezes; and another regiment from Amazonas, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Jose Mariano, with 328 men. These reinforcements, amounting to 2,914 men, with close to 300 officers, were divided into two brigades: one of the line, under command of Colonel Sampaio; and the police corps, which, with the exception of the Sao Paulo detachment, constituted a division under the command of Brigadier General Carlos Eugenio de Andrade Guimaraes. The Sao Paulo police, commanded by Colonel Sotero, marched ahead of the other troops. The entire month of August was spent in mobilizing these forces. They arrived in Bata a detachment at a time and, after being equipped, set out from there for Queimadas and thence to Monte Santo, where there was to be a concentration of all the troops early in September. The battalions of the line, in addition to being greatly understrength as the above figures will indicate, having been reduced to something like two companies each, had come without military equipment of any sort, even of the most rudimentary kind-if one excepts their ancient muskets and the old dappledgray uniforms which they had worn in the recent federalist campaign in the South.

394

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS MARSHAL BITTENCOURT

Marshal Carlos Machado de Bittencourt, in whose hands the situation chiefly lay, then began displaying a notable degree of activity. He was, indeed, the man to confront the difficulties of the moment. Cold and phlegmatic in disposition, he was a bit of a skeptic in his quiet, inoffensive way. His thoroughly plebeian simplicity was not conducive to expansiveness and noble-minded impulses. To give him his due, he was capable-as he was later to show, by tragically ending his life-of running the gravest of risks, but coolly, with balanced mind, doing whatever lay within the inelastic bounds of his duty as he saw it. He was not a brave man; neither was he a coward. No one could conceive of his performing a feat of heroism. No one could picture him slowly and cunningly extricating himself from a dangerous situation. While he was not the perfect type of military man, he was nonetheless addicted to the typical automatism of those machines composed of muscles and nerves which are so constructed as to react mechanically to the irresistible pressure of laws. All this, however, was due not so much to a thorough disciplinaryeducation as it was to his own inert and passive temperament, moving comfortably like a cog in a wheel within the complex machinery of rules and regulations. Outside of this he was a nonentity. Written orders with him were a fetish. He did not interpret them and he did not criticize them; he carried them out. They might be good or very bad; absurd, extravagant, anachronistic, stupid, loathsome; or useful, fruitful, noble-minded, creditable-they were all the same to his proteiform mind. They were in writing; that was enough. For this reason it was that, every time there was a political upheaval, he cautiously withdrew into obscurity. Marshal Floriano Peixoto, a profound judge of the men of his time, in those critical periods of his government when the personal character of followers or adversaries was a matter of moment would always, systematically, leave Bittencourt to one side. He did not summon him; he did not send him away; he did not lay hands on him; for the latter was equally unimportant as foe or partisan. Peixoto knew that this man, whose career had been so uniformly, so inflexibly dull and meaningless, would never make a move for or against the establishment of the states of siege. 49 The Republic, for Bittencourt, was an unlooked-for accident, coming at the end of his life. He did not care for it in the least, as those who fought with him realized. For him it was an irritating novelty, not because it changed the destiny of a people, but because it altered a few ordinances 49 [Referring to the states of siege which, in order to rule by decree, Peixoto declared in the stormy days of the young Republic.)

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and a few decrees, a few fonnulas and hoary precepts which he knew by heart, which he had at his fingertips. Upon his arrival in Baia, he put a damper on the enthusiasm of all who came into contact with him. Whoever approached him in search of encouragement, looking for some spark of happy intuition, some show of manliness in the face of the grave and deeply stirring situation which had brought him there, was surprised to encounter none but the most trivial ideas and long, rambling, incredibly boring discourses on the most frivolous of topics, intenninable minutiae having to do with the distribution of rations and the remounting of cavalry-as if this world were one huge barracks and History merely a variation on a sergeant's records. He came to the city when the patriotic fervor of all classes was at its highest pitch, and in one way or another he cast a wet blanket on it. He might be greeted by noisy demonstrations, poets might read to him their flaming odes, his ears might be deafened on every hand by the explosive phrases of the orator and the shouts and hand-clapping of the multitude. He listened to it all with ill-concealed indifference. He did not know how to reply. His words were few, and it was hard for him to get them out; and, what is more, anything that was out of the ordinary course of life bewildered him and annoyed him. Those recently returned from the battle front, and who were in search of a transfer or a furlough, thinking to dispense with the fonnality of a doctor's certificate, might show him their shotgun wounds, their bloody gashes, their corpselike, fever-ridden faces; it made no impression on him-these were trivial matters, all in the day's work. HEART-RENDING SCENE

On one occasion this lamentable lack of sensitivity made a deep impression on those about him. It was on a visit to one of the hospitals. The scene in that big room was an impressive one. Imagine two long rows of white cots, and on those cots-in every conceivable attitude, lying rigid beneath the sheets drawn over them like shrouds; lying fiat on their faces or huddled against the bolsters in mute paroxysms of pain; seated, or bent over, or writhing and groaning-four hundred wounded men! Heads bound in bloody bandages; anns gone or in slings; legs in splints, stifily extended; thorn-pierced feet swollen out of shape; breasts marred by bulletholes and dagger slashes; every kind of injury, all the sufferings imaginable. The committee which accompanied the minister-the state and military authorities, journalists, men of every walk in life-all entered that room in solemn silence, awed by the sight that met their eyes. Then the

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS gloomy visit began. The Marshal went up to one cot after another, mechanically reading the chart that hung at the head of the bed, after which he would go on to the next. But in one instance he had to pause for a moment, when there rose up from the covers in front of him the war-beaten face of an old corporal, a veteran of thirty-five years in the service. A face that had been battered by rifle butts all the way from the bogs of Paraguay to the caatingas of Canudos. The poor old fellow's wan face was wreathed in a hearty, goodhumored smile. He had recognized the minister, whose orderly he had been in the good old days when, as a mere lad, he had accompanied him in battle, in the cantonment, and on long and wearisome forced marches. Highly excited, he told him all this, in a hoarse voice, tremulous with pain and joy, as the rude but sincere phrases gushed from his lips; his eyes gleaming feverishly, and forcing himself to sit erect, with his thin, trembling hands he bared his emaciated bosom, opening the cotton shirt he wore to reveal, on his collarbone, the scar of an ancient wound. It was a touching scene. Those standing about drew a long, deep, painful breath, their eyes dimmed with tears-but Marshal Bittencourt went on, calmly, to continue his mechanical reading of the charts. All this, strong emotions or heart-rending scenes, was something not on the program. He was not to be distracted by it. He was in all truth the man made for this emergency. The government could not have done better than it did, by placing in his hands the entire conduct of the campaign, without restrictions, leaving him to pursue his straight-line course amid the tumult of this crisis. In thus abdicating its own prerogatives, it made itself in the strict sense of the term the quartermaster general of a campaign the commander-in-chief of which was one of its' own lower functionaries. The fact of the matter is that the Marshal's sound common sense, protected by a cool head which kept him free of any emotional disturbances, enabled him to take in at a glance the real exigencies of the campaign, the least of which, as he realized, was the accumulation of a major number of fighting men for the conflict. Entering a region aflame with rebellion, the fresh troops would merely aggravate the condition of their comrades whom they were supposed to aid, if it meant that they were to share the same privations, with the same scant and penurious resources upon which to fall back. The thing that was necessary above everything else was to combat, not the jagun!;o, but the desert. It was indispensable to give the campaign the thing it had lacked up to now: a line and base of operations. It was ending where it should have begun. And this was the undertaking

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which the minister carried through to success. In the course of his stay at Bafa he was confronted with numerous questions of detail-the equipment of arriving battalions, accommodations for the incessant throngs of wounded returning from the front-but in his mind they were all subordinated to the prime objective and to the one and possibly the only serious proble~ to be solved. Solve it he did in the end, by overcoming a host of difficulties. During the latter part of August there was finally, definitely, organized a regular corps of supply trains, running continuously along the highways at intervals of a few days and effectively linking the army in the field with Monte Santo. This accomplishment foretold the nearing end of the conflict; for, from the beginning, the experience of previous expeditions had shown that the causes of their failure, in good part, lay in the fact that they had blindly shut themselves off in a sterile region, isolating themselves in the presence of the enemy while they engaged in a spectacular police hunt without the faintest semblance of military strategy. Marshal Bittencourt at least did this: he transformed a huge, unplanned conflict into a regular campaign. Up to then there had been a prodigal but futile display of bravery; but heroism and self-'Sacrifice had little to do with the matter. The campaign had crystallized in a nominal siege, the outcome of which was highly doubtful, with incessant fusillades that accomplished nothing while lives were being nobly but stupidly thrown away. And this would keep up for an indefinite length of time, until that sinister settlement ended by absorbing its attackers, one by one. Under such conditions, merely to replace those who fell-eight or ten a daywith others, was to keep turning around in a cruel and vicious circle. Furthermore, a large number of assailants was a drawback. They might surround the village and cut off all the exits, but, after a few days had passed, they would find that they had, round about themselves, the latent, intangible but formidable siege lines of another enemy-the parched desert of the caatingas, with the growing, ineluctable pangs of hunger rising up to confront them. Marshal Bitten~ourt foresaw all this. PROSAIC COLLABORATORS

A higher strategist, concerned with the technical and broader aspects of the question, would have drawn up stupendous tactical schemes which would not have solved it. A brilliant fighter would have planned new and impetuous attacks, with the object of putting down the rebellion in short order; but he would have ended by wearing himself out with nothing to show for it, as his troops marched here and there in double-quick time

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS through the caatingas. Marshal Bittencourt, indifferent to all this-unmoved by the impatience of the general public-organized supply trains and purchased mules. For the truth is, this bloody and truly dramatic campaign was to be brought to a successful conclusion in one way, and one way only, and the solution was a singularly humorous one. A thousand domesticated burros in this emergency were worth ten thousand heroes. The backlands conflict, with all its train of bloody battles, had to be brought down to a deplorably prosaic and humble plane. Heroism could be dispensed with, military genius was disdained, the onslaught of brigades was excluded; and, in place of these, pack mules and their drivers were sought. This way of looking at things, which would make of History a malicious epigram, was incompatible with the overwrought patriotic lyricism of the day, but it was the only sensible view. It was none too flattering to have to have recourse to such collaborators as these in the working-out of our national destiny, but it was forced upon us. The most calumniated of animals was now master of the situation and was to plant his jagged hoofs squarely upon a crisis and crush it. These beasts alone could give to the operations of the campaign that swiftness of movement which was demanded under the circumstances. The war, if necessary, could be prolonged for a couple of months, at a maximum; but three months-and there was no escaping the inevitable conclusion-would mean defeat, the loss of all that had been accomplished, and an enforced paralysis of effort. In November, in this zone, the rainy season would begin, and the consequences would be beyond remedy. The beds of the streams which up to now had been dry would then be foaming with muddy waters, and the Vasa-Barris, suddenly swollen, would be transformed into an enormous flood wave, overflowing its banks and spreading over the countryside; it would not be possible to cross it, and all communications would be cut off. Afterward, when the torrential streams had rapidly subsided-for the vortex of waters, whirling toward the Sao Francisco and the sea, is drained off as quickly as it is formed-tlhere would be complications still more serious in character. Under tbebuming heat of the days in this region, at this time of year, everyi5rook, every seasonal pool, every "cauldron"so buried away among the rocks, every well, is an infemallaboratory, distilling and disseminating far and wide through the air the germs of swamp fever, with an infinite number of them ascending at every point where the so [See pp.

II,

379.)

THE ASSAULT

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sun's rays strike, to fall upon the troops, those thousands of human organisms weakened by fatigue and hence in a morbidly receptive condition. It was, accordingly, imperative to liquidate the war before the start of this dangerous season, by so arranging matters that a real and effective siege could be established such as would lead to immediate surrender. And once they had conquered the enemy who could be conquered, they would at once, without the loss of a moment's time, fall back before that eternal and invincible enemy-the desolate and sterile earth. But, for this, it was indispensable to guarantee the subsistence of the army, which, with its recent reinforcements, had been increased to around eight thousand men. This was what had to be done, and the minister of war did it. The consequence was that, by the time he set out for Queimadas early in September, everything was in readiness to put a speedy end to the conflict; the brigades of the "Auxiliary Division" were awaiting him at their concentration point in Monte Santo, and the first of the regular supply trains, even though few in number as yet, now left for Canudos. IN CANUDOS

They arrived in time to bring new hope to the expedition which up to that date had spent more than forty days in dangerous and futile action, hard up against the flanks of the settlement. We have already given brief extracts from a diary of their days5I -brief, because we wished to avoid a tiresome repetition of episodes one of which was very like another: the same sudden, instantaneous, and violent fusillades at irregular hours; the same deceptive truces; the same shattering of apathy by battle alarms, over and over again; the same strange and oppressive calm, broken by a blaze of rifle fire. Daily engagements, at times deadly ones, thinning their ranks and depriving them of their most capable officers; at other times noisy and long drawn out, but, like those encounters between the mercenaries of the Middle Ages, innocuous in character, resulting in the expenditure of thousands of bullets but without a single wound, a single sc~atch, on either side. And, finally, the hand-to-mouth existence that they led, on third-rations when they had them, with an ox to a battalion and a liter of flour to a squadron;52 and, as during those terrible times on Mount Favella, the daily forays in which whole detachments took part, by way of rounding up the stray cattle of the vicinity. The supply trains were few and far between, their schedule uncertain, and by the time they arrived they would have left a part of their cargo " See pp. 369 fl.

so lef. pp. 339""40, 39I-1)2.)

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS behind them along the roads. The expeditionaries were once more confronted with the one real peril they had to face: hunger. Sheltered in the huts, or quartered in tents behind the hills, or huddled in their trenches, they had little to fear from the jagun!;o. Their dangers consisted exclusively in the enemy's sniping at those incautious ones who strayed from cover. The towers of the new church rose high above them like a couple of sinister mutansS3 overlooking the army, and no one escaped the marksmanship of those who manned those towers, and who never abandoned them, no matter how loud the cannon might roar. The crossing to Favella continued to be, for this reason, a dangerous one, it being necessary to station a guard along the riverbank at the point where the roadway runs in order to prevent any imprudent soldiers from taking. this path. It was at this point that the troops sent as reinforcements received their baptism of fire: the Girard Brigade on the fifteenth of August, reduced now to 56 officers and 892 men; the Sao Paulo battalion, which arrived on the twenty-third with 21 officers and 424 men; and the Thirty-seventh Infantry, which preceded the "Auxiliary Division," and which numbered 16 officers and 205 men, under command of Lieutenant Colonal Firmino Lopes Rego. The enemy let them descend the last slopes in peace, lying in wait for them at the final stage, in the river bed down below, where they gave them a resounding and theatrical reception, consisting of a fusillade invariably interspersed with terribly ironic hoots and catcalls. The truth is, the jagun!;os were not frightened by these fresh antagonists but remained unshaken in their attitude of calm defiance. They appeared to have set up a system of discipline and would send messages from one end of the village to the other, across the maze of huts, by firing their blunderbusses in a certain manner. They were, also, more orderly and assured in their bold attacks. They themselves received supply trains, which came in by the highways across the Varzea da Ema, without our troops' being able to capture these trains, for the reason that they feared to leave their positions unprotected or, a more serious consideration, dreaded falling into a trap; for over the hills to the north, and from there on to Canabrava and Cocorob6, circling the battalions at a distance, flying columns of jagun!;os roamed, swift-moving and invisible, but leaving behind them unmistakable signs of their presence. Not infrequently an inexperienced soldier, upon coming out on top of a hill, would be brought down by a bullet which came from outside the settlement, from those other intangible siege lines with which our troops were surrounded. The u [See p. 240. D. 7.)

THE ASSAULT cavalry and traction animals were often stampeded, in their pasture ground along both banks of the river, by the firing; and, one day in August, twenty of the artillery mules were captured by the enemy, in spite of the fact that the important task of guarding them had been intrusted to a veteran battalion, the Fifth of the line. These incidents showed an unusual vigor on the part of the rebels. Meanwhile, our forces gave the latter no respite. Since the nineteenth of July the three Krupps had been mounted on the slope, with the vanguard of the Twenty-fifth at the bottom; their position commanded the square, and they kept up a pounding fire day and night, starting conflagrations which were with difficulty extinguished and completely ruining the old church; the wooden framework of that structure could be seen jutting out through the roof, which had been in part destroyed, and it was incomprehensible how the fearless sexton could still make his way up into the belfry to sound the sacred notes of the "Ave Maria." THE CHURCH BELL

As if this bombardment at close range were not enough, on the twentythird of August the Witworth 32 was brought down from Mount Favella. That was the day on which General Barbosa was wounded as he was inspecting the center battery, next to the First Column's headquarters, and the arrival of the monstrous cannon afforded an opportunity for immediate revenge. This was had at dawn of the following morning, and it was indeed a terrible one. As the great piece thundered, the enormous shrapnel could be seen falling between the church walls with a loud crash, blowing the roof to bits and carrying away what was left of the belfry, while the old bell itself hurtled through the air, its clapper beating noisily, as if it were still sounding an alarm-that bell which so often, at twilight, had summoned the fighting jagun9)s to their prayers. FUSILLADE

Aside from this incident, however, the engagement was a loss to our side; for a piece of apparatus had become stuck in the mouth of the cannon, silencing it forever. Eight soldiers dropped along the line of fire, as the enemy now began a heavy, truly stupendous, and incomparable fusillade, which lasted into the night and until dawn. It was resumed during the day, following a slight lull, and four of our men who fell, together with a half-dozen of the Twenty-sixth who had taken advantage of the tumult to desert, brought the day's losses to ten. It continued on the twentysixth, with four casualties in the ranks; on the twenty-seventh, with four

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS killed; on the twenty-eighth, four casualties; on the twenty-ninth, one officer and four privates; and so on at the same rate, until our troops were completely exhausted. These losses, along with those suffered in previous engagements, since the middle of August had made imperative a reorganization of the thinningranks. With the number of brigades reduced from seven to five, and with more and more officers from the top down being killed or wounded, it was apparent that, despite the reinforcements which had arrived, the expedition was growing weaker.54 Of the twenty battalions of infantry54 "Headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief, Field of Battle at Canudos, August 17,1897. -Order of the Day, No. I02.-Reorganization of the Forces Operating in the Interior of the State. "On this date the following organization of my command was effected: Fourteenth Battalion of Infantry, under the command of Captain Antonio da Silva Paraguassu of the Thirtysecond; the Twenty-second, under the command of Major Henrique Jos6 de Magalhaes, of the same corps; the Thirty-eighth, under the command of Captain Alfonso Pinto de Oliveira of the same corps; these infantry detachments constituting the First Brigade, under command of Colonel Joaquirn Manoel de Medeiros of the Fourteenth; the Fifteenth, under the command of Captain J0s6 Xavier de Figueiredo Brito of the Thirty-eighth; the Sixteenth, under command of C:1ptain Napolew Felippe AcM of the Twenty-fourth; the Twenty-seventh, under command of Captain Tito Pedro Escobar of the Twenty-fourth; the Thirty-third, under command of Captain Jos6 Soares de Mello; these detachments constituting the Second Brigade, commanded by Colonel Ignacio Henrique de Gouveia of the Twenty-seventh; the Fifth, commanded by Captain Leopoldo Barros e Vasconcellos of the same corps; the Seventh, under command of Captain Alberto Gaviao Pereira Pinto of the same corps; the Twenty-fifth, under the command of Major Henrique Severiano da Silva; the Thirty-fourth, commanded by Captain Pedro de Barros Falcao; these detachments constituting the Third Brigade, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Emydio Dantas Barreto of the Twenty-fifth; the Fifth Regiment of Artillery, under command of Captain Jow Carlos Pereira Ibiapina of the same corps; battery of the Second Regiment, under the command of First Lieutenant Aphrodisio Borba of the Fifth Position Battalion; and a rapid-fire battery, commanded by Captain Antonio Alfonso de Carvalho of the First Position Battalion; these detachments constituting the artillery brigade, under the command of Colonel Antonio Olympio da Silveira of the Fifth R~giment; the above brigades to remain a part of the First Column, commanded by Brigadier General J oao da Silva Barbosa; the Ninth Battalion of Infantry, under the command of Captain Jose Lauriano da Costa of the Thirty-first; the Twenty-sixth, under the command of Captain Francisco de Moura Costa of the Fortieth; the Thirty-second, under the command of Major Florismundo Collatino dos Reis Araujo G6es of the same corps; the Thirty-fifth, commanded by Captain Fortunato de Senna Dias; these detachments constituting the Fourth Brigade, under command of Colonel Donaciano de Araujo Pantoja of the Thirty-second; the Twelfth Infantry, commanded by Captain Joaquim Gomes da Silva of the Thirty-first; the Thirtieth, commanded by Captain Altino Dias Ribeiro; the Thirty-first, under the command of Major Jow Pacheco de Assis of the same corps; the Fortieth, under the command of Major Manoel Nonato Neves de Seixas; these detachments constituting the Fifth Brigade, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tupy Ferreira Caldas of the Thirtieth; these brigades to form the Second Column, temporarily under the command of Colonel Joaquirn Manoel de Medeiros; while Major Aristides Rodrigues Vaz of the Sixteenth assumes temporary command of the First Brigade. The cavalry contingent, commanded by First Lieutenant Joao Baptista Pires de Almeida of the First Cavalry, is to form a part of the First Brigade and is to be at the disposition of the commander of that brigade, along with the engineering contingent and the Fifth Police Corps.MTBtrlI. OscAR DE ANDRADE GUIIlARAES, Brigadier General."

THE ASSAULT not including the Fifth Regiment of Artillery, the Fifth Baian Police, a rapid-fire battery, and a cavalry squadron-fifteen were now commanded by captains, while two of the brigades were under the command of lieutenant colonels j if the command of companies was not in the hands of sergeants, it was for the reason that, as it happened, there were fewer sergeants than sublieutenants. The situation was soon to change, however, and Canudos was to have, in exact figures, thirty battalions, not counting other branches of the service.55 The division which was to be their salvation was now on the road. " The Fourth, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, Twelfth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Sixteenth, Twentysecond, Twenty-third, Twenty-fourth, Twenty-fifth, Twenty-sixtb, Twenty-aeventh, Twentyeighth, Twenty-ninth, Thirtieth, Thirty-first, Thirty-second, Thirty-third, Thirty-fourth, Thirty-fifth, Thirty-seventh, Thirty-eighth, Fortieth, all battalions of the line; the Fifth of Bafa; one battalion from SAo Paulo; two from Pam; one from Amazonas; thirty all told. To be added are: the Fifth Regiment of Artillery; a battery of the Second Regiment of Artillery; a rapid-fire battery; a cavalry squadron; the Fourth Baian Police Corps; and the volunteer Moreira Cesar Battalion, in charge of the supply trains.

CHAPTER IX NEW PHASE OF THE STRUGGLE I

Q

QUEIMADAS

UEIMADAS, a settlement dating from the beginning of the century but now in full decline, had become a noisy armed camp. A collection of poverty-stricken huts awkwardly clustered about an irregular-shaped prat;a, deeply furrowed by torrential rains, it was in reality a clearing in the wilds, and the monotony of the surrounding plains and barren hills gave it a mournful air, the appearance of a deserted village fast falling in ruins and overrun by the wilderness. There were, moreover, painful memories associated with the place. Here it was that all the previous expeditions had been assembled, on the bit of ground extending from the village square to the caatinga, whose parched, grayish-white leaves had given the place its name.' Repugnant heaps of rags and tatters, filthy multicolored shreds of old uniforms, old shoes and military boots, kepis and soldiers' bonnets, smashed canteensall the odds and ends of a barracks were scattered over this extensive area, along with the remains of bonfires left by those who had pitched their tents here ever since the start of the Febronio expedition.' On this bit of offal-strewn ground ten thousand brawling men had bivouacked, with passions, anxieties, hopes, and discouragements beyond the power of description. DEMONIAC PAGES

Having climbed a small knoll, one could see, cutting through the underbrush, a long, broad, rectilinear furrow of arable land, with a shooting target at the far end; this was the firing range where the Arthur Oscar Division was accustomed to practice. Near by, at one side, was the little, low chapel, like a walled tent, scrawled over with the coarse literature of soldiers, in their rude handwriting. All the battalions had collaborated on these pages, carving their impressions of the moment with the point of a saber or daubing them with chunks of coal on those holy walls. Demoniac pages, these, consisting of brief, incisive, hair-raising sentences, terriI

[Queimado. burnt or parched; queimar. to burn; queimada. a conflagration.l

• [See pp. IBg if.)

NEW PHASE OF THE STRUGGLE ble blasphemies, imprecations, exclamations, enthusiastic viva's, sprawling all over the sides of the chapel, the black. characters being interspersed with exclamation points as big as lances. 3 It was here, along an imperceptible slope, that the Monte Santo Road began-that narrow, ill-famed trail down which three successive expeditions, filled with high hopes, had gone, while down that same road now, bound in the opposite direction, came bands of wretched fugitives. Having forded the shallow, stagnant waters of the Jacuricy, the trail bends and threads its way across the plains that lie beyond, flanked at the beginning by another road marked by the posts of the recently strung telegraph line. A GEOGRAPmC FICTION

The railway line runs along the other side. This mark of modem progress is, however, meaningless here and does not in the least alter the genuinely rustic character of the place. One alights from the train, walks a few hundred yards between rows of squat houses, and forthwith finds himself, at the edge of the village square-in the back.lands. For this is in reality the point where two societies meet, each one wholly alien to the other. The leather-clad vaqueiro will emerge from the caatinga, make his way into the ugly-looking settlement, and halt his nag beside the rails where natives of the seaboard pass, unaware of his existence. BEYOND THE BOUNDS OF THE FATHERLAND

The new expeditionaries, upon reaching Queimadas, were aware of this violent transition. Here was an absolute and radical break between the coastal cities and the clay huts of the interior, one that so disturbed the rhythm of our evolutionary development and which was so deplorable a stumbling-block. to national unity. They were in a strange country now, with other customs, other scenes, a different kind of people. Another language even, spoken with an original and picturesque drawl. They had, precisely, the feeling of going to war in another land. They felt that they were outside Brazil. A complete social separation expanded the geographic distance, giving rise to the nostalgic sensation of being very far from home. The mission which had brought them there merely served to deepen the antagonism. There was the enemy, out there to the east and to the north, hidden away in those endless highland plains; and far, far away, beyond the plains, a terrible drama was being unfolded. It was, surely, a paradoxical kind of fatherland whose own sons had to 'See p. 4II.

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS invade it, anned to the teeth, with martial tread, ripping out its very entrails with their Krupp cannon. And, all the while, they knew nothing whatever about it; they had never seen it before but viewed with amazement the arid earth, rugged and brutal, bristling with thoms, tumultuously littered with stone heaps and pulverized mountains, tom asunder with caverns and ravines, while all about were the parched and barren tablelands, great, rolling, steppe-like plains. What they were being called upon to do now was what other troops had done-to stage an invasion of foreign territory. For it was all a geographic fiction. This other was the reality, plain for all to see from what had gone before. The soldiers felt this and were obsessed by the thought. Here were those unknown woodsmen sending back to them, day by day, mutilated and defeated, their comrades who, a few months previously, had gone down that same road, strong of body and proud in spirit. As a result, there was no heart left in them; they had not the courage to strike out, unconcerned with what might happen, into the depths of those mysterious and fonnidable backlands. IN CANUDOS

Happily, upon their arrival at Queimadas, the effect of all this was counteracted to a degree by the receipt of encouraging news from the front. There had been no further disasters, and, in spite of the enemy's daily fusillades, our forces were still holding the positions they had won. The Girard Brigade and the Sao Paulo Battalion had reached Canudos in time to fill the gaps in the thinning ranks; and, meanwhile, the rebels were beginning to show the first signs of discouragement. They no longer rang the bell of the old church, by way of showing, vaingloriously, how uncon~ cemed they were; for there was no bell to ring; and, in the intervals of firing, their melancholy litanies were no longer to be heard. They had ceased their attacks on our lines; and at night there was not a flicker of light, not a sound, as the settlement lay submerged in darkness. The rumor then began going the rounds that the Counselor was being held prisoner by his own followers, who had revolted when he announced his intention of surrendering and giving himself up to martyrdom. Other details were cited, all of them pointing to a rapid dying-down of the conflagration. PRISONERS

Indeed, the new combatants fancied that it had been extinguished even before they reached Canudos. Everything appeared to indicate as much. The first prisoners were at last being brought back, after all these months

NEW PHASE OF THE STRUGGLE of fighting; and our men could not help noticing, without attempting to explain the fact, that there was not a full-grown man to be found among them. 4 These captives, escorted under heavy guard, were pitiful ones indeed: half-a-dozen women with infants wizened as fetuses at their bosoms, followed by older children, from six to ten years of age. The soldiers crowded around to stare at them curiously as they made their way through the town-a town swarming with uniforms of every branch of the service and of every rank. It was a sorry spectacle as these ragged creatures, under the gaze of all those eyes-insatiable eyes that seemed to look straight through their tatters-came into the square, dragging their young ones by the hand. They were like animals at the fair, an amusing sight. Round about them could be heard comments of every sort, in every tone of voice, whispered comments, with lively interjections and expressions of astonishment. This wretched band was for the time being something to take one's mind off things; a pleasing diversion to lighten the long and tedious hours spent in camp. It excited the curiosity of all without touching their hearts. THE CHILD IN THE KEPI

One of the children-a thin little mite, barely able to stand-wore on its head an old kepi which it had picked up along the road and which came down over its shoulders, covering a third or more of its emaciated bosom. This big, broad hat kept swaying grotesquely at every step the child took, and some of the spectators were so unfeeling as to laugh at the sight. Then the child raised its face and looked them in the eye. Their laughter died on their lips; for the little one's mouth was a gaping bullet wound, from side to side! The women were for the most part repulsive-looking, with the hardened faces of old shrews and evil, squinting eyes. One of them, however, stood out from the rest. Suffering had chiseled her face without destroying its youth, and an Olympian beauty was to be descried in the firm, impeccable lines of that Judaic profile,s disturbed now by the protuberance of the cheekbones in a countenance which, pale and ravaged by hunger, was lighted by big black eyes filled with a deep and sovereign melancholy. She satisfied the curiosity of her listeners by relating a simple story. A tragedy in half-a-dozen words, a trivial enough one, in all truth, with the invariable epilogue of a bullet or a splinter from a grenade. Having been placed in a hut on the ground-level next the square, the prisoners were surrounded by insistent groups and were compelled to sub4 See

pp. 437 fl.

slCf. p. 157.]

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS mit to interminable questionings. Finally, attention came to be centered on the children, in the belief that the truth might be learned from their ingenuousness and sincerity. ANOTHER CHILD

One of these, however, a lad of less than nine years but with the shoulders of an embryonic athlete, amazed them all with his precocious swaggering and his craftiness. His answers were given between stout puffs on a ciga"o, as he drew on it with the self-assured nonchalance of an old roue. He volunteered a stream of information, almost all of it false, revealing the astuteness of the consummate rogue. His interlocutors took it all in, religiously, for this was a child speaking; but, when a soldier entered with a Comblain rifle in his hand, the boy stopped his babbling and, to the astonishment of all, remarked in a tone of conviction that a "comble"was no good. It was a "sissy" gun; it made a "damned big noise," but there was no force behind it. For himself he preferred a "manulixe"; that was a rifle that was a rifle. And so they handed him a Mannlicher, and he proceeded to work its lock as easily as if this had been some favorite childish plaything. They asked him if he had ever fired one of them at Canudos. "What do you think?" he said. "Those soldiers down there are a bunch of old fogies! .... But when the young bucks get after 'em, they give 'em what-for, and they have to take it like a bull in a corner; the jig's up then; we take 'em down a peg or twO."6 This lad was, of course, tremendously depraved; but he was a lesson to those who heard him, all the same. Here was a finished bandit, cast up by this backlands conflict, with a formidable legacy of errors resting upon his boyish shoulders. Nine years of life into which had been packed three centuries of barbarism. It was plain that the Canudos Campaign must have a higher objective than the stupid and inglorious one of merely wiping out a backlands settlement. There was a more serious enemy to be combatted, in a warfare of a slower and more worthy kind. This entire campaign would be a crime, 7 a futile and a barbarous one, if we were not to take advantage of the paths opened by the artillery, by following up our cannon with a constant, stubborn, and persistent campaign of education, with the object of drawing these rude and backward fellow-countrymen of ours into the current of our times and our own national life. But, under the pressure of difficulties demanding an immediate and assured solution, there was no place for these distant visions of the future. 6 ("A cabrada fechava 0 samba desautorisando as pracas," etc. The lad speaks a backlands patois.) '(Cf. the author's "Preliminary Note," p. 2.)

NEW PHASE OF THE STRUGGLE The minister of war, after stopping four days in Queimadas, where he removed the last obstacles to the mobilization of our forces, departed for Monte Santo. EN ROUTE TO MONTE SANTO

Accompanied only by two headquarters staffs, his own and that of General Carlos Eugenio, Marshal Bittencourt had to make his way to the base of operations across a region clogged with wounded men. While his party may have been well mounted and well provisioned, they encountered along these well-traveled roadways as many difficulties as did those who came after them on foot along the rough backland trails. It took them three days to make the journeYj and at every bend of the road they came upon some gloomy aspect of the war, the physical setting of which was becoming more accentuated every step of the way, as the earth grew increasingly rugged and became more calcined and sterile. The first farm at which they stopped, the one known as "Tanquinho" ("Little Cistern"), was a sample of what was in store for them. This was the best of its unnatural kind: half in ruins, with two abandoned houses hidden away behind the fine Iacework boughs of the tableland evergreens, with slender, melancholy cacti running down to the roadway. The cistern which gave the farm its name was formed by a surface stratum of granite, providing a narrow strip of impermeable soil where stagnant water, freed from the avid suction of the surrounding sandstone, might collect and form a small lake. Along its edge, and the same was true of all the roadside pools, dozens of wounded men were resting, and it was here, also, that the waggoners of the supply train camped. There was lacking, however, the characteristic noise and bustle of a campj all was mournful and silent, a saddening cluster of emaciated figures, lying motionless, as if paralyzed, in the utter stillness of complete exhaustion. It was a deeply moving and a tragic sight, as night fell and the kindled bonfires cast their gleams on the dark water. Some of the men could be seen huddled around the fires, shivering with ague, while others hobbled slowly about, their huge misshapen shadows projected on the level surface of the lake. Thirsty officers who had gone down to the edge of the marsh for a drink would bump into specters barely able to stand on their feet as they strove to give the military salutej and these officers would come back depressed by the experience. From now on, it was to be the same scene many times repeated: along the roads, the same defeated "quitters"j"and at the edge of the greenish-black, algae-covered swamps, the same wretched clusters of human beings. A pleasing contrast to all this, adding a touch of health and strength to

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS

410

the picture, was afforded from time to time, when some quiet, inoffensive fellow would leave the caravan of wounded men and draw up along the wayside-some friendly vaqueiro whom they met at the bend of the road, an ally who had hired out to the transport service. Astride his leathercaparisoned steed, his broad-brimmed sombrero turned up jauntily above his swarthy, honest face, his long "alligator" knife in his belt and his harpoon-like cattle prong in his right hand, the back.woodsman would remain there, motionless, leaving room for the cavalcade to pass, with the proud, respectful bearing of the disciplined soldier. A staunch figure he was in his leather vest of vermilion-gray, which for him became a cuirass of bronze, a giving him the appearance of a robust warrior covered still with the dust of battles. The Marshal's party went on and soon forgot this picture of the sturdy sertanejo, their attention being constantly attracted by the incessant bands of fugitives: soldiers going along slowly, leaning on their rifles; and officers carried in hammocks, their hats down over their eyes, deaf to the clattering hoofs of the passing cavalcade, immobile, rigid as corpses. Here and there were to be seen large dark splotches in the caatinga, the charred remains of conftagrations with the beams and ridgepoles of houses still showing, weaving a warp of ruins over the desert wastes as the terribly stupid background of this war. At Cansan~a.o they found relief from these cruel impressions. Here, for a couple of hours, they had a comforting sense of calm. This village was really a clan, belonging to one single family; and its chieftain, a patriarch of the old school, at once assembled his sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons for a rousing ovation to the Marshal. It was all done with a wholesome ingenuousness and alacrity that was pleasing in the extreme, the old "Monarch" even lifting the astonished minister down from his horse, taking him in his arxns-those arms wearied from eighty years of toil. This stop was a providential one. Cansan¢o was a parenthesis amid the general desolation. And this hardy old man who ruled the village was in his tum a revelation, with his assured and wholesome manner toward these men whom he had never seen before, as he introduced to them a white-haired son and grandsons whose hair was turning gray. The antithesis of the precocious young bandit of Queimadas, he was an embodiment of that miraculous robustness, that organic nobility and simplicity of soul, which is so characteristic of the backwoodsmen when they are not led astray by crime and fanaticism. This, to the Marshal's party, was an encouragement; and for this reason the tiny village of a dozen houses I

[Cf. pp. 9~3.)

NEW PHASE OF THE STRUGGLE

411

crowded together along a street not many yards long is the only one which, in the history of this campaign, does not evoke painful memories. It was the one tranquil zone in all the hurly-burly. A small hospital had been set up there, in charge of two Franciscans, who cared for those wanderers bound for Queimadas who had not the strength to go any farther. Upon leaving Cansan~ao, the Marshal and his companions went back to the hardships of the dusty trail-a hopelessly winding trail, with an infinite number of bends, branching off into many bypaths and bordered by ruined cottages, while down the road from time to time came one band after another of fugitives. OUTRAGEOUS PALIMPSESTS

On every hand, after leaving "Contendas," on every white wall of every more presentable dwelling that made its appearance among the mud huts, the Marshal's party encountered a scrawled page of infernal protests. 9 Every wounded man on passing by had left there, daubed with lumps of coal, a reflection of his own bitterness of heart. They had all expressed themselves with the utmost license, taking refuge in a common anonymity. The army had here flattened its mailed fist to trace in enormous characters the plot of the drama. The result was a photographically exact reproduction of the outward aspect of the formidable conflict; that was the true significance of these monumental inscriptions with their crude handwriting, so glaringly expressive of their authors' feelings. Without any concern for form, with no deceptive fantasies, these rude chroniclers had left here, indelibly recorded, a concise but true account of the major scandal in our history. They had done it brutally, fiercely, in the form of incredible lampoons and pasquinades intermingled with the most revolting pornography and deep cries of despair, but without a sentence or a phrase anywhere that was worthy of a man. The dark wave of rancor rolling down the highway had covered the outer walls and then had entered the houses, daubing the inner walls all the way to the roof. Upon going inside, the Marshal's party were repelled by the mute chorus of insults and profanity. Halting verses and equally halting rhymes gave voice to unbelievable obscenities accompanied by frightful drawings; it was as if the imprecations were being hurled back from the four comers of the room, with the turbulent letters on the wall doing a fantastic dance, the rigid exclamation points coming down violently, like the thrusts of a sword!O Villa this! and Villa thatl Death to thisl and Death to thatl leaped from every side, coupling and defaming the most illustrious names, , See pp. 404-5.

"Seep. 405.

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS without rhyme or reason. Ferocious puns, bold and insulting allusions, the dismal humor of the barracks. The undertaking, of a sudden, lost its heroic aspect; it was no longer a noble and a brilliant enterprise. Future historians will endeavor in vain to veil its true character with glowing descriptions; but, for every page they write, there will remain those outrageous and indestructible palimpsests. IN MONTE SANTO

By the time they reached Monte Santo, the new troops felt little martial ardor. They were dejected. Their spirits were revived, however, as they entered the village which constituted the base of operations. Within a few days' time Monte Santo had shed the shrunken, stagnant appearance that is common to backlands settlements where for a hundred years and more not a house has gone up. It was now a vastly larger place. The surrounding plains were "white with tents, two thousand of them, forming a new quarter and one larger than the town itself in normal times, with long avenues which were plainly to be seen, the level-lying ground presenting no obstruction to the view. There were six groups of these tents, and, over them all, banners were floating in the breeze, and from them all, at almost every moment, came the vibrant, metallic notes of bugles and the beat of drums. The town was now crowded with a multitude of new inhabitants from foreign parts, filling the square and overflowing down the narrow lanes, a heterogeneous assortment of men from all walks of life. There were officers of every rank and from all branches of the service; wagon-drivers, dust-begrimed from long journeys; soldiers bending under the weight of their equipment; the wounded and convalescent, limping along; women in tattered garments; busy tradesmen; groups of merry students; journalists eager for news, who went about asking questions incessantly-all this gave to the scene the appearance of a city pra~a on the day of a parade. Marshal Bittencourt at once put the town under strict martial law and lost no time in adopting such measures as accorded with the complex needs of the situation. The military hospital now became a reality, thoroughly well equipped and under the charge of skilled surgeons, aided by a number of students from the Faculty of Bala who had volunteered their services. A proper discipline was everywhere established; and, at last, the question which had originally brought the minister there-that of the transport service-was definitely settled. Almost daily, partial supply trains were leaving for and returning from Canudos. The results of these efforts were immediately visible. They were ap-

NEW PHASE OF THE STRUGGLE parent in the news coming from the battlefront, where everything pointed to a new spirit on the part of the besiegers, who were now engaging in decisive tactical maneuvers. If this was so, it was owing to one individual, an individual seemingly so incapable of any enthusiasm, who even at the base of operations declined to lay aside his bourgeois' alpaca coat, clad in which he reviewed the brigades. It was due to the fact that this man, thanks to the high degree of devotion that he displayed-and this is said without any desire to offend the sensibilities of those who were engaging the enemy at close rangehad made himself, in reality, the supreme commander in this conflict. At a distance of forty miles from the front, he was in fact directing that conflict, without any boasting, without any weighing and balancing of strategic plans, but by spending his days in the rude company of pack-drivers at Monte Santo; he could frequently be seen, amid a throng of them, rising to his feet impatiently, watch in hand, as he gave the signal for departure. For each supply train that was sent was worth battalions. It was a battle won. It gave the fighting men fresh hope of victory and little by little was doing away with that stagnation which had paralyzed our siege lines. This was what one gathered from the latest reports. IN CANUDOS

The month of September, the truth is, began auspiciously enough. Early in the month---on the fourth, to be exact-one of the jagun!;os' leading chieftains had been killed by a rifle bullet. He fell near the churches, and the haste with which the inhabitants of the settlement threw themselves on his corpse, to take it away, showed that he was a person of importance. On the sixth there was an event of greater significance, when, one after the other, the towers of the new church crashed to the ground. This happened after six consecutive hours of bombardment, and was entirely unexpected, being attributable to an unpleasant circumstance which had arisen. In dispatching munitions to the front, someone had made a mistake and, in place of grenades, had sent plain cannon balls for the Krupps, which were little suited for the purpose in hand, and it was accordingly decided to use them up by firing on the churches. The surprising result was commemorated in a couple of enthusiastic orders of the day. The army at last had been freed of those high battlements from which the besieged had fired upon it with so deadly an effect; for the two towers had commanded our entire lines, reducing the effectiveness of our trenches. Ever since the eighteenth of July they had been manned

4I4

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS

by expert marksmen whose sharp eyes let nothing escape them, so that no one dared so much as show his face from behind the shelter of the huts. When the supply trains arrived, they had been greeted with a violent fusillade from the church towers, just as they reached the last lap of their journey and were crossing the river, before entering the gully which formed a covered passageway. It was from there that the newcomers, the auxiliary brigade, the Sao Paulo Battalion, and the Thirty-seventh Infantry, as we have seen, received the enemy's first savage salute. ENTHUSIASTIC JEERS

And now, at last, those towers had fallen, It was an impressive sight to see them tumble, one after the other, carrying away with them large sections of the wall in the form of huge blocks and burying the bold sharpshooters in the ruins; the stones fell with a great crash into the village square, amid a cloud of pulverized mortar, as our entire army ceased firing and rent the air with triumphant cries. The commander of the First Column well described it in his order of the day: " .... our advance line and the supporting troops in the camp behind, on this occasion, breaking out with enthusiastic jeers directed at the jagun!;O rabble."" That is a good description of the campaign itself. From beginning to end, one saddening hue and cry. "Enthusiastic jeers..... " However that may be, the enemy's spell was broken now. The enormous settlement had of a sudden shrunken in size. It seemed smaller and more squat than ever, appeared to be huddled more deeply than ever in the depression in which it was built, being deprived of those two tall and slender white towers which had been a landmark for herdsmen for miles around, and which, reaching up to the blue and mysteriously dissolving in I I "Headquarters of the Commander, First Column, Canudoa, sixth of September, 11197, Order of the Day No. 13. "For the information of the forces under my command, I publish the following: ''Having ordered the commanding officers of the artillery today to bombard the towers of the new church, the points from which the enemy had directed his most effective fire upon UB, causing us many losses in killed and wounded and obstructing our own line of fire, I had the satisfaction, after six consecutive hours, of seeing those towers fall. This was due to the excellent aim of the battery directed by Second Lieutenants Manoel Felix de Menezes and Fruetuoso Mendes and Sublieutenant H. Duque Estrada Macedo Soares, the first mentioned being on the sick list at the time. I desire especially to give credit to these brave officers who once more have shown their ski1l in directing the cannon under their command, and particularly Second Lieutenant Manoel Felix, who, though on the sick list, fulfilled his duties faithfully. I was gratified with the effect that all this produced on the army as a whole, which observed with great interest the result of the artillery's fire, our advance line and the supporting troops in the camp behind, on this occasion, breaking out with enthusiastic jeers directed at the jagun~ rabble. The officer in question was the first to begin the bombardment and the last to fire on the tower to the right, Sublieutenant Duque Estrada being the last to fire on the one to the left, completing its demolition," etc.

NEW PHASE OF THE STRUGGLE

41 5

it, or gleaming brightly on starlit nights, served to objectify the rude and credulous sertanejo's ingenuous mysticism, bringing nearer to the heavens his propitiatory prayers. THE "SEVENTH OF SEPTEMBER TRENCH"

This event was an ill-omened one for the jagun~os. The following day they suffered a major disaster. Intrenched for long at the "Old Ranch House," several dozen sertanejo warriors had been defying Colonel Olympio's cannon mounted on the rim of Mount Favella. Only a few paces from the artillery and the supporting contingents, the enemy had for more than two months prevented the expansion of our siege lines in this direction, in spite of the storm of bullets poured upon them in a direct line of fire. In a dominant situation as they were, above the bulk. of our forces which were stationed on the edge of the village, they were able to sweep our thinning ranks, a fact which contributed greatly to the daily losses that we suffered. In brief, this position rivaled the church towers when it came to uncovering our most carefully planted breastworks and shelters. qn September 7, however, at ten o'clock at night, the enemy wa~ suddenly routed from it. Encouraged by the successes of the day before, and in obedience to an order from the commander of the First Column, Colonel Olympio descended the mountain with a force consisting of the Twenty-seventh under command of Captain Tito Escobar, a contingent of the Fourth Battery of the Second Regiment, another of the Fifth Regiment, and one machine gun. In the front and at the rear were former students of the military schools. The rest of his forces, Colonel Olympia deployed as sharpshooters along both flanks. Stealing silently down the slopes, this detachment fell like an avalanche upon the hill below. Taken by surprise, bowled over by the shock of three hundred bayonets charging from either side, with the machine gun in the middle firing at them pointblank, the jagun!ros were able to put up little resistance and were quickly dislodged from the stone trenches which they had constructed there, round about the ruins of the "Old Ranch House." The engagement lasted five minutes. Driven back and scattered, the fugitives were pursued by the vanguard all the way to "Bald Pates' Hill," where they plunged into the river bed down below and made their way across it, until they were lost from sight in Canudos. Our troops had suffered only two casualties. Having captured this position, which occupied a broad stairstep on the slope of the hill between Mount Mario," which had previously been occupied, and the Vasa-Barris, Colonel Olympio proceeded to pitch his tent II

lSee..p. 256 and n. 25; see also pp. 266, 271, 305, 309, 310.]

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS on the spot where, six months before, the leader of the third expedition had died. All the rest of the night was spent in building a strong redoubt, about a yard in height, out of stones taken from the enemy's trenches, along the entire outer edge of the terrace. The next day the "Seventh of September Trench" overlooked the settlement. The periphery of the siege had been increased by some fifteen hundred yards to the left, in a southerly direction, entirely cutting off the two eastern quadrants. On the afternoon of the same day it was expanded still farther, with a bend to the west, all the way down to the point where the Cambaio Road begins, near the confluence of the Mucuim, embracing the whole of the western sector. THE CALUlrIBY ROAD

In the meantime a more serious military movement was being undertaken, the one truly strategic action of the campaign, it may be. It was conceived, planned, and carried out by Lieutenant Colonel Siqueira de Menezes. Relying upon information gathered from certain loyal vaqueiros, that officer had come to realize the advantages of another supply route, the Calumby Road,'3 one about which little was known. Running through the country that lay between the Rosario and Cambaio highways, in an almost straight line due north and south, it was shorter than either of those roads and made possible a rapid and easy communication with Monte Santo. He proposed to explore the route in question, although to do so involved the greatest risks. The undertaking was carried out in three days' time. The lieutenant colonel left Canudos on the fourth day of September, at the head of 1,500 men, comprising the combined Twenty-second, Ninth, and Thirty-fourth battalions under the immediate command of Major Lydio Porto. The newly discovered road was duly traversed, the detachment returning on the seventh by way of the Cambaio trail, in a bold, swift movement the results of which were extraordinarily fortunate for the outcome of the war. It was true enough, the new path, which was open to the transportation of troops and supplies and closed to the jagun~s, whose favorite trail it had been in the past, in their excursions to the south, reduced the distance to Monte Santo by more than a day. Of all the roads, it was the one best adapted to resist invasion. Like the Rosario Highway, it forked off from "Joa," running to the left of that road in a due northerly direction. For many miles it skirted the interminably winding Carafuas River, cutting across it at times, but keeping on always in the same direction, bordered II

See pp. 295""96.

NEW PHASE OF THE STRUGGLE here and there by small farms,'until it came to another seasonal stream, the Caxomong6. From there on it became a highway of incomparable importance from the strategic point of view. Running southeast were the Calumby Highlands, which for a considerable stretch bordered the road to the right, at a distance of three hundred yards. An army coming down the road would thus have to expose its flank to the enemy intrenched on the slopes. And, having passed this extremely dangerous point, it would find itself in an even more perilous situation; for, after climbing an extensive elevation, the road suddenly enters a short, narrow defile that is completely hidden from view by the tangled boughs of umburanas stalks which grow in the vicinity. Here was to be found a natural breastwork of siliceous marble only a little above the ground in height, a sort of rude countermure with a narrow, wicket-like fracture in the center. There were no trenches here. They could be dispensed with. Rifles leveled over the top of this rampart would be able to sweep the enemy's columns as they came along. And in case the enemy succeeded in going any farther, which was to presuppose a bit of rare good luck in the face of an adversary so well sheltered and raining bullets upon him, he would then to his surprise, after the first few steps he had taken, find himself trapped in a terrain that was all but impassable. By a geological circumstance common enough in the northern backlands, the land continues to be as rugged as before, presenting the same sort of impediments. Thus, immediately beyond the defile, it slopes down to the "Varzea" farm, affording what is apparently an easy passage, but one which is in reality extremely difficult for troops under fire. A broad layer of limestone is spread out here in a notable state of atmospheric decomposition. Riddled with innumerable cavities separated from one another by sharp and lacerating edges, scarred wifh deep furrows and long, rigid chips that resemble knife blades, bristling with sharp-pointed spurs, its surface abruptly broken by wide burnished "cauldrons"-U; short, as rugged as can be, at every point-the terrain here offers impressive evidence of the effects of energetic climatic agents which have been at work on it for centuries. Following prolonged periods of drought, tempestuous acid-like rains have corroded, perforated, and undermined it, and its turbulent, wasted appearance is but a reflection of the storms that have beaten upon it. Treading this jagged terrain, the strongest-made boots would be ripped to shreds as their wearers unavoidably stumbled and fell in a highly dangerous manner. To give battle here was out of the question, where even peaceful travelers could only go forward, one at a time, along a side trail

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS that led to "Varzea" down below-a broad basin strewn with flint fragments and surrounded by dense caatingas. The consequence was that, upon reaching this point, the invaders would be subjected to fire from all sides. And, even assuming that they did succeed in advancing, after they had gone a thousand yards beyond they would face an inevitable annihilation; for there the road disappears, dropping down into the deep and winding bed of the Sargento River, along the banks of which are to be seen the large, gleaming, dark-blue folds of a superimposed talc-schist formation, streaked with white quartz veins; in certain places these layers run horizontally, from one bank to the other, almost, so that one has the feeling of passing through an enormous ruined aqueduct, with the crumbling remains of its ancient vault still showing here and there. This extensive ditch takes the place of the road for a distance of a mile. Like the others in the neighborhood, it is not a river but a drain, filled from time to time with floodwaters which here find a channel to the Vasa-Barris. Dotting the banks on either side were to be seen the jagun~os' trenches, a short distance apart, affording either a direct or slantwise cross-fire on the river-bed road at every bend that it made. The one thousand men of the Arthur Oscar column would never have succeeded in effecting a passage here. They had taken the Rosario Road, and that had been their salvation, while the expeditions that preceded them had marched, in tum, by way of the Uaua, Cambaio, and Massacara trails, always varying the route chosen, which had led the sertanejos to believe that this last expedition, following the usual practice, would come by the Calumby path. Had it done so, not a soldier would have reached Canudos,'4 and the result would have been a major disaster to add to the defeats already experienced in this campaign; for our troops would have gone along as chance guided them, in complete ignorance of the formidable terrain and the grave difficulties that awaited them. Now, however, the jagun~os had abandoned these positions and had withdrawn into the settlement. This movement, accordingly, on the part of Lieutenant Colonel Siqueira de Menezes was an admirably conceived and advantageous one. Having manned the principal points along the way as far as "Joa," he then took the Calumby Road, which was lined with empty trenches. Leaving a wing of the Twenty-second to occupy these trenches, he went on to Lake Cip6,.s where whitening bones served as a reminder of the slaughter inflicted on the Febronio expedition. Here he surprised a number of enemy scouts and captured from them thirteen 15

See pp. 216, 218.

NEW PHASE OF THE STRUGGLE

419

pack animals. From there he proceeded to the confluence of the Mucuim, where he took by surprise two enemy trenches that were still there. The line of siege was widening. A quick and safe route had been opened for the mobilization of our forces. The main portion of this road, from the Sargento River to the "Sussuarana" farm, passing by way of "Varzea" and "Caxomong6," was now garrisoned by the Thirty-third, Sixteenth, and Twenty-eighth battalions of the Second Brigade and a wing of the Sii Paulo Battalion. Canudos was invested by a huge semicircle, extending from the extreme north to the "Old Ranch House" on the south, and from there eastward to the head of the Cambaio Road. There remained open to the jagun~os, on the northeast sector, only the Uaua and Varzea da Ema trails. The nearing end of the campaign was to be foreseen. II MARCH OF THE AUXILIARY DIVISION

The new expeditionaries, coming along the recently opened road from Monte Santo, were possessed of a most unusual kind of fear: the haunting, besetting fear that they would not find a single jagun~o left with whom to fight. They were certain they would find that everything had been settled, and they felt scandalously cheated by the course of events. The first detachment to leave, on the thirteenth of September, was the brigade of northern police corps. This was due wholly to reasons of an administrative nature, but it rankled in the minds of those who composed the brigade of the line, which was to follow a few days later, under General Carlos Eugenio. VAINGLORIOUS FEAR

SO many of the rebels were falling every day, they had met with so many reverses, having been driven back from their best positions, and were so entangled in the meshes of the encircling siege lines that every passing hour appeared to these laggard heroes to diminish the probability of their being able to share in the victory celebration.'6 For this reason the northeast brigade advanced at a dizzying pace, stumbling over the roads from early dawn and only halting when the burning rays of the sun made it necessary for the exhausted soldiers to take a rest. The brigade of the line followed closely at the same swift pace, marching light of baggage and spurred on by the same foolish longing to measure its strength with the weakened enemy, if only in a skirmish. And so they strode on boldly-gal• • 6 See

p.

422.

420

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS

!ant, well fed, able-bodied-making all possible haste to the mud-hut citadel which for three months past had been swept by cannon fire, battered by assaults, devastated by conflagrations, and which all the while was defended by a handful of men. Upon reaching "Sussuarana" farm, fifteen miles from Canudos, they recovered their spirits, for they could now hear the dully echoing rumble of the artillery; and in Caxomong6, when the wind was right, they could even make out the steady crack of rifle fire. CAXOMONOO

Amid all this warlike zeal there were certain unlooked-for incidents that gave the men a start. The backlands conflict had not completely lost that mysterious aspect which it was to preserve until the end. As they penetrated ever deeper and deeper into the hinterland, that region of great barren highlands, as they passed the desolate little farms and the farmhouses in ruins-all in the open desert-the gluttonous warriors so eager for battle could not repress a shudder of dread. I myself was the witness of this on one occasion. Colonel Sotero's brigade had arrived on the third day of its march, the fifteenth of September, at the farm known as "Caxomong6," on the edge of the danger zone. Anyone coming to this place from "Boa Esperan~" crosses an unencumbered plain bordered by picturesque highlands; or, should he come by way of the "Sussuarana" ranch, he will follow the border of an ipueira well filled with water; but, once he arrives, he finds himself in the midst of a sterile and depressing landscape. The terrain is of rough sandstone, vermilion in hue, its strata inclined at an exaggerated angle of forty-five degrees. This it is that accounts for the rapid absorption of the rains that fall here, which gives to the tract the harsh imprint of the caatinga. The farmhouse, a wretched one, stands on the bank of the river, which is nothing more than a trench with perpendicular walls three yards high; completely clogged with rocks of every size and shape and wholly dry, the "river" disappears among the hills stripped bare of foliage. The troops arrived here at mid-morning. There were the two corps from Para, as well disciplined as the best of the line, and the one from Amazonas i and all were clad in the characteristic uniform which had been adopted from the time they left Baia., both officers and men wearing big hats of carnauba straw with turned-down brims, which gave them the appearance of a large band of woodsmen. Despite the early-morning hour, they pitched campi for they had found sufficient water in a neighboring

NEW PHASE OF THE STRUGGLE

421

pit that was deep and dark as the mouth of a mine. This was their last halt. The next day they would be at the settlement. The lifeless landscape now took on a sudden animation, being filled with tents, stacked arms, and the noisy stir and bustle of 968 fighting men. Along the banks of the river tall ingaranasI7 grew, their boughs, still in leaf, intertwining above the bed of the stream. Dozens of swaying hammocks were strung up between the flexible branches, and the men took their ease. The day was calm and peaceful. There was nothing to fear. Then night fell, and the silence of the night was broken by the dull and measured roll of distant thunder to the north, a thunder that came from the cannon of Canudos. But the enemy, held tight within the siege lines, would surely have no heart left for adventurous sallies along the roadways. The night, like the day, would be without incident. And, even supposing the jaguncos did put in an appearance, they would find an adversary waiting and eager to receive them. FALSE

ALAlU(

All was quiet as the troops quickly dropped off to sleep-only to be awakened with a start, at 10:00 P.M., every man of them. A shot had been fired on their left flank. One of the soldiers standing guard on the sentry line which had been thrown about the camp had seen, or fancied he had seen, a suspicious-looking figure slipping away in the darkness, and he had promptly discharged his rifle. This, surely, was the enemy they had been longing to meet. As in the case of previous expeditions, he had stolen upon them for a swift, sudden, bold attack. Then it was that those who had been so eager to measure their strength with the foe had a mysterious, hallucinatory glimpse of what this campaign was really like. They now had a chance to see for themselves, at close range. An indescribable hypnotic fear thereupon laid hold of the battalions, and blaring bugles, cries of alarm, shouts of command, were to be heard on every hand. There was much anxious running about, as startled officers leaped from their hammocks into the river bed below and dashed up the banks in great disorder, bumping into one another, slipping and falling. With swords unsheathed and revolvers drawn, they rushed headlong down the ranks, as the men with a great clatter of bayonets adjusted their weapons and took their place in line. The scene was bedlam itself, with companies and platoons hurriedly and haphazardly forming into squares, as if expecting a cavalry charge-whole detachments with fixed " (The ingarana is the PiIIruellobi_ racemiflorum Ducke.)

422

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS

bayonets, ready to countercharge a vacuum. And among all the companies, platoons, and detachments, lone individuals and small groups running about wildly here and there, trying to find their place in the confused formation. For a number of minutes these fighting men were gripped by an emotion they had never thought to experience, as they waited for the enemy's attack. The brigade now took on the appearance of a long, flashing, turbulent ship's wake, on the bright and tranquil wave of moonlight in which the whole of the quietly sleeping landscape lay submerged. But it was a false alarm. HALF-RATIONS OF GLORY

The next morning their fears were gone, and they were once more the impatient heroes of old. Marching rapidly and with no further qualms, they made their way down the trench that is known as the Sargento River, which now of a sudden overflowed with uniforms. Then they climbed the barren hill whose slopes on the opposite side descend abruptly into the Umburanas Valley. There, they were surprised to see, directly ahead of them and down below, a mile and a quarter away-the village of Canudos. This was a relief. There were the two ruined churches, facing each other across that legendary square-the new church, its towers gone, its main walls crumbled, split from top to bottom, a veritable rubbish heap; the old one, likewise ruined and blackened, its fa!;ade missing, but a bit of the shattered belfry still standing, the belfry where that fantastic sexton so many times had summoned the faithful to prayers and to the battle. Round about was the compact mass of huts. They were in time; they were not to be deprived, after all,of those half-rations of glory about which they were so concerned. And so they made their triumphal entrance into camp, with the mien of those who are destined to go down in history but who in reality had come there in search of a bloody but an easy victory. 18 APPEARANCE OF THE CAMP

The appearance of the camp had changed; it no longer presented the turbulent aspect of former days. It now was like another village alongside Canudos. Crossing the dry bed of the Vasa-Barris, the newcomers made their way through a winding gully. Halfway down this gully, in a wide concavity to the right, was a huge leather-covered shed, the field hospital; and, a short distance farther on, they came to the tent of the commanderin-chief. " See pp. 4Ig-20:

NEW PHASE OF THE STRUGGLE

4 23

Meanwhile, they had the impression of being in a newly built town. Scattered over the slopes on either side of the road or clustered in tiny valleys, their colors standing out against the grayish hue of the tents, were numerous houses of a novel kind and with a festive air, being wholly constructed of foliage, the roofs and walls green with the boughs of the joaz tree. These dwellings appeared to be singularly inappropriate to those who inhabited them, but they were as a matter of fact the only ones suitable to this region. It was the burning heat, transforming the tents into flaming furnaces, which had inspired this primitive, bucolic architecture. There was nothing at first glance to reveal the presence of an army. This was more like one of those dubious backlands villages; and the illusion was completed by the "first settlers"-unprepossessing individuals in peasant garb, trailing swords and shouldering rifles, most of them wearing tasseled leather hats, and without shoes or with sandals on their feet; while elsewhere were to be seen tattered women tranquilly sewing in the doorways or going along laden with bundles of firewood. A stranger well might believe that he had lost his way and had strayed here by mistake into the midst of a jagun~o settlement-until he had reached the commanding officer's tent farther on. Upon climbing the hillock at the foot of which the general headquarters stood, he would find on the top the engineering commission, housed in a native hut which had not been destroyed; and, by putting his eye to the chinks in the wall-a wall thickened by blocks of stone-he would have a close-up view of the church square a hundred yards away. He was now on the slope at the bottom of which were the stockades along the most dangerous portion of the front, where the Twenty-fifth Battalion was holding the center; this was the "black. line," the point at which our forces had penetrated most deeply into the outskirts of the settlement in the assault of the eighteenth of July. Turning to the left, beneath the barrier formed by the discontinuous line of huts that are scattered along there, after going a few paces he would come to First Column headquarters. Descending the southern slope along a winding ledge, he would find, halfway down, a small hut housing the headquarters of the Second Column. This would bring him to the Quartermaster General's tent, with the Sao Paulo Battalion camped down below, on a sandy plain which in flood season is inundated by the waters of the Vasa-Barris. Continuing on his way, after having crossed the bed of the Vasa-Barris under shelter of the stone breastworks, which ran from one bank to the other and were manned by the Twenty-sixth, he would reach the outermost trench of the siege lines, held by the Fifth of Baia, stationed in a deep gutter formed by the Providencia River. Two hundred yards

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS farther on to the left, high above, on the bulge of the hill near the "Old Ranch House," creating the impression of a hanging bastion, was the Seventh of September Trench. By thus making the circuit of the intrenchments, the new expeditionaries were able to obtain a clear view of the situation, and, as a result of their inspection, they found some of their former optimism slipping from them. This sector of the siege line was still a small one compared to the size of the settlement, which to them was cause for astonishment. Accustomed as they were to the tiny, dwarfed appearance of back.land cities, they were amazed by this Babylon of huts sprawling over the hills. CANUDOS

Canudos at this time contained-they were later counted, one by one-

5,200 dwellings;t p and, inasmuch as these huts with their vermilion-colored clay roofs were not readily distinguishable from one another, even at those points where they were not huddled together, they came to take on a disproportionate size to one whose gaze had first grown used to the heap of ruins about the square. Seen in perspective, they created a striking impression, which added to the mysterious atmosphere of the place. It was hard to realize that there were so many human lives down there. The closest observation, when a lull in the battle permitted, failed to reveal a single countenance, a fugitive glimpse of a single individual, and there was not to be heard the slightest sound of any kind whatsoever. It was like an ancient necropolis--or, again, with all that jumble of roofs and crumbling walls, an enormous buried-under cata, eaten away with erosions, its surface scarred with pits and caverns. However, let not the observer show too much of himself above the parapet, or a sudden shower of bullets would quickly enough reveal to him the presence of the population burrowing in those ruins. Let but a single shot be fired, at any hour, over the top of that hill, and there would come the inevitable and prompt reply; for, if the jagun~os no longer held the initiative in the matter of attacks, they still responded with all their old-time vigor. The siege might be slowly wearing them out, but they had lost none of their aplomb and made it a point of honor to conceal any signs of weakening. Meanwhile, it was plain that things with them were in a very bad way indeed. This was evident from the ruins beneath which they now had to burrow for safety. The settlement no longer had its garrison of incorrigible "bad men." The population was largely made up of women and children, who for three whole months had been put to the It See

p. 475.

NEW PHASE OF THE STRUGGLE ordeal of fire and sword; and many times, above the roar of battle, there would come the sound of piteous wails. Some days before, a shrapnel fired from Mount Favella, after skimming the cornices of the new church, had fallen among the huts near the arbor where prayer services were held. Instantly, there came a heart-rending response, which disturbed even Colonel Olympio's artillerymen,in the form of a prolonged and indescribable chorus of lamentations, a mournful melody of anguish-laden cries, which led that officer, deeply moved, to issue a stem command; whereupon the cannon fell silent. Thus, doubly blockaded, between the thousands of soldiers, on the one hand, and the thousands of women, on the other hand-between lamentations and warlike shouts, between tears and bullets-the rebels were, from one moment to another, losing ground. That was inevitable. The assurance of victory now spurred our men on to acts of daring. A sergeant of the Fifth Artillery twice ventured to cross the entire square at night, making his way into the ruined house of worship and bringing back a couple of dynamite bombs which had not exploded. A sublieutenant of the Twenty-fifth, some days afterward, rivaled this exploit by setting fire to what remained of the old church, all of which now went up in flames. The troops which had recently come up to take part in this unequal conflict were aware of these things, and they consequently began to worry once more, fearing that the enemy, being thus in extremis, would not have enough fight left in him to enable them to display their own strength and valor. The new iron-clad brigades were fairly panting to put down the insurrection in this, its last convulsive stage. Those who had been there aU these months had had more than their share of glory. They were fed up with triumphs, and, now that their subsistence was assured, thanks to the daily supply trains, they deemed it useless to waste any more lives in an effort to hasten the enemy's inevitable surrender. They accordingly remained irritatingly indifferent. In the intervals between attacks, which were growing longer now, the camp took on the appearance of a well-policed small town. There was nothing about it to suggest the ferocious campaign that was being waged. At the quarters of the engineering commission, General Arthur Oscar, whose free and easy disposition lent an irresistible charm to his company, would hold forth at length on various subjects that had nothing whatsoever to do with the war-pleasing memories of bygone days, hilarious anecdotes, or weighty discussions on political topics. Meanwhile, faithful observers, with a praiseworthy devotion to science, would be taking hourly temperature readings and barometric pressures, invariably putting

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS down a zero for the nebulosity of the heavens as they consulted their hygrometers with faces that were extremely grave. In the military pharmacy students on forced vacations would be laughing noisily and reciting verses; while through the thin walls of all those charming bowers, their foliage spangled with withered joaz blooms, would come the voices and the laughter of those within, who had no fears to disturb their light and carefree hours. The rare bullets that passed high overhead, bounding off the crests of the hillocks, were a cause for no concern. No one paid any attention to them any more. The rhythmic precision with which they cracked or whistled through the air indicated that they were fired by certain sharpshooters in Canudos who had been stationed there to prevent the besiegers from forgetting that the sertanejo was still keeping watch on them. They made no impression, however, even though some of them, lower than the others, would beat against the canvas of the large officers' tents. The same was true of the heavy fusillades, which still broke out occasionally, during the night, when our men were least expecting them. Life, in short, was becoming abnormally normal, taking on at the same time certain extravagant aspects. The soldiers of the "black line," in the trench farthest forward, would sometimes, in the early hours of the morning, strike up a conversation with the jagun~. The interlocutor on our side would go up to the edge of the trench, and facing the village square, would call out some name, the first that he happened to think of, in a friendly, honest tone of voice, as if he were calling to some old comrade; and invariably, from the mass of huts, or nearer at hand, from the ruins of the churches, there would come a response, with the same homely, slightly ironic twang. A most unusual conversation would then be carried on in the darkness, the two speakers exchanging information on all kinds Qf subjects, baptismal names, places of birth, their families, living conditions, and the like. Not infrequently, this strange chat would take the form of obscene jokes, and there would be a burst of smothered laughter from the nearest lines. This dialogue would keep up until a divergence of opinion occurred, and then, of a sudden, from side to side, there would be half-a-dozen harsh insults couched in a forceful argot and, after that, a period in the form of a bullet. The men of the Fifth Police, despite the fact that their earthen breastworks afforded them only an illusory protection, would kill time with serenades (descanles),·· expressive of their longings for the banks of the I . [The ducanlu, WOIIIJS, and liranas are old song-poem forms prominent in the folklore of the backlanda. The duca1llu were in quatrains and were sung by the boatmen of the SAo Francisco, the vaqueiros of the Northeast, plantation workers, etc. (see Luis cia Camara Cascudo, Vaqulirol , cMSI4Iloru [porto Alegre: Livraria do Globo, 19391, p. 125).1

NEW PHASE OF THE STRUGGLE Sio Francisco. If they were interrupted by a fusillade from the enemy, they would boldly dash up to the firing line, discharging their ritles and fighting like demons, terribly, frantically, the rhymes of their favorite trOfJ0,s21 still on their lips, timed now to the cadence of bullets. Some of them would drop, singing as they fell; and, after the skirmish was over, the others would return to their backlands diversion, languorously intoning their tiranas- and strumming their banjos, as if all this were one big ranch, with merry pack.-drivers taking their noonday ease. THE CHARLATANISM OF COURAGE

Everyone, the short of it is, was adapting himself to the situation. The daily spectacle of death had bred a disregard for life. Toward the end the veterans would go from one end of the camp to the other, from the extreme right to the extreme left, without taking even the most elementary precautions. As they came out on top of an exposed hillock, they would scarcely quicken their steps as the bullets flayed the earth all around them. They would laugh at those inexperienced newcomers who, in passing points that were under fire, became thoroughly frightened; to see them running, dodging, ducking down, all but squatting, was a terribly comic sight. These novices were unable to refrain from giving a start as a bullet flashed by with a low hissing sound, the insidiously wheedling note of death itself; nor could they restrain themselves from showing their feelings over the most trivial incidents--such as the three or four dying men who were daily carried back from the front lines. Some of them were merely displaying the charlatanism of courage, a sorry kind of snobbery. Clad in their unifonns, their stripes and buttons glistening in the sun, they would remain in some open place freely swept by the enemy's fire or would stand upright on the top of some unprotected hillock. a mile or so from the settlement, by way of estimating the jagun~os' maximum firing range. The truth is, this conflict had made them callous. They would tell their new comrades of all the hardships they had endured, taking care to stress the dramatic aspect of things. They would relate the somber episode of Mount Favella with its train of battles and all that they had suffered there, the long days of privation shared by officers and men alike-there was, for example, the case of that sublieutenant who had died when he broke his fast by gorging himself with great handfuls of flour, after having had nothing to eat for three whole days. Then OJ (A form that stems from the love songa of the medieval troubadours of the Iberian Peninsula.) U

(Melancholy love songs, slow in movement, on the theme of love's

,,,11"",.)

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS there was all the trouble they had had chasing wild goats and picking shriveled fruit from the dead shrubs. They narrated all that had happened, in all the minute details. And they concluded by observing that there was very little left to be done; in this war, the grain had been harvested and all that remained was to sweep up the chaff; the enemy, contemptible creature, was very weak; you could hear the death rattle in his throat. All that was happening now was merely a noisy pastime, nothing more. The men of the Auxiliary Division, however, were not so easily reconciled to the secondary role thus assigned them. Was it for this that they had covered those seventy-five miles of backland territory-merely to look on, as an inoffensive spectator, even though one armed from head to foot, as the rebel settlement little by little succumbed to the slow process of strangulation, without the feverish convulsions of a battle?

III EMBASSY TO REAVEN

The blockade of the settlement was, however, incomplete, with an extensive outlet still remaining on the north; and, as a consequence, the enemy was not yet down to his last resources. The Varzea da Ema and Ualla trails were still open, branching out into many bypaths over the plains beyond, in the direction of the broad basin of the Sao Francisco, passing through a number of obscure little places until they finally reached the insignificant hamlets along the banks of that river, between Chorroch6 and Santo-Antonio da Gloria. By these routes the jagunr;os were able to procure a small amount of supplies, while fresh reinforcements found no obstacle confronting them on their way to Canudos. For, as it happened, these roads ran in what was precisely the most favorable direction, across a huge tract of territory where the backland regions of six states, from Bafa. to Piaui, meet and overlap. For this reason they provided the best exit that the sertanejos could desire, leading as they did to the very womb where all the elements of the revolt had been generated. If worst came to worst, they represented escape and salvation; the population fleeing along these trails could hardly be pursued for at least the first few miles. The desert-vast and impervious-would give them shelter. But they were not fleeing, even though they realized that the forces of their adversary were growing in strength, while they themselves were becoming weaker. Their leading fighters were gone now: Pajehu,23 who fell II

See pp. 158,

220-21,

301, etc.

NEW PHASE OF THE STRUGGLE

in the last battles of the month of July; Jooo Abbade,'4 who died in August; the crafty Macambira,'5 slain but recently; Jos6 Venancioj"' and others. The principal ones left were "Big Peter,"'7 the terrible defender of Cocorob6, and Joaquim Norberto,.· who was elevated to a post of command for the simple reason that there was no better man available. In addition, there was a scarcity of provisions; and day by day the discrepancy between the number of able-bodied fighting men, which was constantly diminishing, and the number of the women and children, the crippled and infirm, which was steadily increasing, became more pronounced. This greatly hampered the movements of those who were capable of bearing arms and reduced their means of subsistence. True, these weaker members of the community might have made their escape by slipping away a few at a time, along the trails that were still open, leaving the others unencumbered and sparing themselves the supreme sacrifice. This, however, they did not care to do. Of their own volition the weak and disabled, conscious of their uselessness, had devoted themselves to an almost complete fast for the sake of their defenders, whom they would not now desert. Life in the settlement, meanwhile, had become atrocious. This was shown by the misery, the complete dejection, the terrible state of emaciation of the six hundred prisoners taken. The inhabitants were spending indescribable days of anguish, with the last gateways to life and liberty still open to them. The fact would have remained forever inexplicable had not the source of this admirable stoicism been later revealed by those who had gone through it all. The story was a simple one. On the twenty-second of August·, Antonio Conselheiro had died. As he saw the churches fall, the sanctuary crushed, the saints shattered to bits, the candles scattered, the holy relics buried in the debris of the walls; above all-hallucinating vision I-as he suddenly caught sight of the Good Jesus, no longer on the high altar but lying, a sinister figure, on the ground, dismembered by a grenade-a.s he beheld all this, the Counselor was shaken by emotions too violent for his weakened frame to bear. From that moment he began to die. Refining upon his customary abstinence, "4

See pp. 159, 218-19, 241-42, etc.

"' See pp. 157-58.

II

See pp. 158,319,342,387.

"'See p. 158.

II

See p. 158.

I, [The Brazilian editor has the following note: This date, given in the first edition and all

subsequent ones, escaped the attention of the author in all his revisions. It is, nevertheless, incorrect. The reading should be "Twenty-second of September," as on p. 469. The CounBelor's corpse was exhumed on the sixth of October, and the physician, ]oio de Souza Pond6, who made an external examination of it at that time declared that "it could not have been dead for more than twelve days" (see Dantu Barreto, Destrui~iio de Cantldol [Bafa, 19I2I, p. 295).1

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS

43 0

he refused to touch a morsel of food. And one day they found him within the ruined temple, lying flat on his face, his forehead pressed to the earth, a silver crucifix at his bosom. His body was already cold and rigid in death when it was discovered that morning by "Pious Anthony."3 0 This event, an outstanding one in the history of the campaign, in place of bringing the conflict to an immediate end, as might have been expected, appeared, rather, to have given new life to the insurrection. It may have been due to the sharp wits of one of their leaders, who foresaw the disastrous consequences which might ensue; or, and this may well be believed, it may have arisen spontaneously as a result of mass suggestion, when the pious ones grew disturbed by' the apostle's absence (although his public appearances in these latter days had been extremely few)-but, whatever its origin, an extraordinary bit of news was then divulged. The Counselor's vanquished followers gave the following ingenuous account of it: Antonio Conselheiro had gone on a journey to heaven. When he saw his chief adjutants being killed and the number of soldiers increasing, he made up his mind to appeal directly to Providence. The fantastic ambassador was at this moment in God's presence. He had provided for everything. That was why it was our soldiers, even when they were in the greatest straits, were unable to leave these parts as they formerly had done. It was because they were weighted down in their trenches. It was necessary for them to remain here, on the scene of their crimes, and make the supreme expiation. For the prophet would soon return, with millions of archangels; with flaming swords gleaming aloft, this Olympian band would descend like a flight of heavenly birds, would fall upon the besiegers like a thunderbolt, and then the Day of Judgment would begin. This was a weight off all their souls; and the true believers prepared for the final act of penance, the greatest of all, the one that was to be their salvation. And none of them noticed that, shortly afterward, under one pretext or another, a number of unbelievers, such as Villa Nova,31 began abandoning the settlement for parts unknown. These latter were barely in time, the last to make their escape; for on September 24 the situation underwent a change. THE SIEGE IS COMPLETED

On the morning of that day, while our left wing and the cannon of Favella began a heavy attack, by way of distracting the enemy's attention, Lieutenant Colonel Siqueira de Menezes set out on an expedition of his own, at the head of the Twenty-fourth, Thirty-eighth, and Thirty-secS·

[See pp. 159-00, 4(18 II., 475.]

SI

See pp. 159, 458.

NEW PHASE OF THE STRUGGLE

43 1

ond battalions of the line, under the command of Major Henrique de Magalhaes, Captain Affonso Pinto de Oliveira, and Lieutenant Joaquim Potengy; the Amazonas contingent; the right wing of the Sao Paulo detachment, commanded by Major Jose Pedro de Oliveira; and a cavalry contingent under command of Sublieutenant Pires de Almeida. These troops now made for the sector which had not as yet been brought within the line of siege, attacking on the way the small bands of jagun!;os to be found in the outlying houses scattered here and there on this side of the settlement. This was something on which the enemy had not counted, the sector in question being diametrically opposite the "Old Ranch House" and the farthest distant from the original line of attack. A new suburb had grown up here, "Vermilion Heights" ("Casas Vermelhas"). It had been built following the defeat of the third expedition, and the dwellings looked more like ordinary houses, some of them having tiled roofs. They were not properly fortified, however, for they lacked those trench shelters which were so numerous at other points; and-a disastrous circumstance for the rebels in this emergency-being the most remote from the firing line, all of them were crammed with women and children. Our troops with the Twenty-fourth in the van, marching along the river bed, fell upon and cleared these houses in a few minutes' time. As generally happens, they were held up in their advance by the terrorstricken womenfolk. The jagun!;os, indeed, did not at once yield their positions but fell back, fighting as they went, and, in following them, the soldiers became enmeshed in the narrow lanes. Taking the offensive, the invaders proceeded to stage once more the same inevitable scenes. Forcing their rifle barrels through the mud walls, they fired at random inside, after which they knocked down the huts with the butts of their weapons and threw lighted matches on the kindling heap of miserable furniture and old rags. The fires thus started lighted the way for them as the sertanejo kept falling back in front of them to the nearest convenient hideout. Here and there, one or another of the enemy would put up a stupendous resistance, selling his life dearly. One of them, with his wife and daughter clinging to him, the moment the door was crashed in, threw them roughly from him and leaped to the threshold, where he felled the first assailant that he met with a terrible blow-a sublieutenant, Pedro SimOes Pinto, of the Twenty-fourth. A moment later he himself lay stretched out, surrounded by soldiers with drawn swords; and, as he was dying, he let fall a mournful phrase: "At least I got one of them." There was another who furnished our men some diversion. It was at

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS once an amusing and a horrible episode. Lying in the comer of a room which they had invaded, without the strength even to sit up, was an aged curiboca, extremely emaciated and half-nude, covered only with a sheet. The old fellow was doing his best to fire an ancient fowling piece 3t but was unable even to lift it. Despairingly, he let it fall back in his flabby arms, while his bony face writhed in a grimace of impotent wrath. The soldiers had surrounded him in a moment and now burst into a noisy laugh. Nevertheless, this desperate resistance, in which even the dying took part, was slowing their progress. Within a short time they had suffered thirteen casualties. Moreover, while the enemy was falling back, he was not fleeing. He remained only a couple of paces ahead of them, in the same house, in the next room, separated by only a few inches of mud wall. They were accordingly compelled to halt. In order not to lose what ground they had gained, they erected a barricade out of furniture and the ruins of the houses. This was the usual and obligatory practice. For in front of them was no neutral terrain. The jagun!;o was clinging-indomitably-to the opposite slope of the parapet, vigilant, trying out his aim. TRAGIC STAGE-SETTING

The thunderous echoes of this engagement to the north of them were heard by the men in camp and created great excitement among them. Thronged with the curious, all the huts adjacent to the engineering commission constituted an enormous theater pit from which to view the drama that was taking place. Focusing their binoculars through all the crevices in the walls, the audience stamped, applauded, shouted bravos, and hissed. In their eyes the scene before them-real, concrete, inescapablewas a stupendous bit of fiction which was being acted out on that rude stage to the sinister glow of leaping flames caught up by the northeast wind, the yellowing smoke being shot with fugitive gleams and licking tongues of fire as it bellowed upward in huge puffs. This was the shading of the stage picture, extending from one side to the other and occasionally veiling the whole of it, like the curtain that falls at the end of the act in a tragedy. At such moments as these the settlement was wholly lost to view, its huts no longer visible, as before the spectators there stretched a smooth gray screen of smoke that hid everything from their gaze. Etched against this background was a circular disk, like a live coal, red and lusterless-a peeping sun in eclipse. Of a sudden, however, the curtain would be tom .. See elsewhere.

NEW PHASE OF THE STRUGGLE

433

by a stiff gust of wind, and through the enormous rent, from top to bottom, could be glimpsed a triangular bit of the settlement-bands of panicstricken women and children running southward in great tumult and confusion, their figures barely to be made out against the withered foliage of the arbors near the square. The batteries on Mount Favella were pounding them from in front, and the poor wretches, thus caught between two lines of fire, flayed by bullets, on the one hand, and driven back by cannon, on the other hand, finally ended by diving into the heap of ruins at the back of the sanctuary; or at another moment they might be hidden by the dense clouds of smoke from the slow and inextinguishable conflagration, rolling slowly over the rooftops, hovering along the ground, or swelling upward in spirals with the slow, undulating motion of great silent waves, rising and falling with the wind. For an instant the smoke would clear from the mutilated fa~de of the new church, affording a glimpse of crumbling wall; then all would be veiled again; and, farther on, a deserted stretch of river bed would next be revealed, or the dissolving smoke wreaths would be seen girdling the summits of the knolls and hillocks. The curious gaze of those too far away to take part in the battle was fastened upon that fog curtain; and whenever, in this monstrous amphitheater, that curtain became quite impenetrable along the entire circle of crude "boxes," the audience would immediately become uncontrollably obstreperous, the frantic spectators giving vent to their vexation and disappointment by shouting and by waving their useless binoculars in a vain attempt to follow the plot which had been thus unexpectedly cut off from their view. Meanwhile, the engagement was being abnormally prolonged. In place of the usual intermittent rifle fire there was a lively and heavy fusillade, the bullets crackling with the noisy sound of popping reeds in a canebrake that is on fire. As a result, the anxious onlookers, straining their ears, could not help thinking that perhaps the sertanejos might have broken through our lines to the north. The echoes from the gunfire, reverberating from the hillsides and growing in intensity beneath the thick blanket of foglike smoke, threw them off their reckoning. Those crackling bullets appeared to be near at hand, on their right and in their rear, giving rise to the illusion that the enemy, having made his escape, might be hurling himself pell-mell upon them, in a sudden retaliatory move. Orders were snapped back and forth as the reserve corps formed in line, and there was great excitement and much running about in all directions. Then came the distant muftled roar of shouts and viva.'s, and, snatching up their binoculars again, all made a rush for the fortified lookouts. At

434

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS

that instant the wind opened a broad, clean furrow in the smoke, parting it from one side to the other and revealing once more the scene of the drama. Their feelings were vastly relieved, and they burst into loud cheers; for the jagun~os were retreating. At last they could see, stretching all the way to the Cambaio Road, a line of vermilion-colored flags. Canudos was completely blockaded. It did not take long for the news to reach the camp, and swift-riding couriers at once set out for Monte Santo, from which point the news would be telegraphed and spread all over the country. The settlement was now wholly surrounded by'a discontinuous line of trenches, through which, however, it would noJonger be possible for a single inhabitant to make his escape. On the eaSt was the center of the camp; in the rear of the "black line" the Third Brigade held the center; on the north were the recently captured positions, manned, respectively, by the Thirty-first, the left wing of the TWenty-fourth, the Thirty-eighth, the right wing of the Sao Paulo Battalion, and the Thirty-second Infantry, cutting across the Uaua and Varzea da Ema trails; throughout the whole of the northeast sector, scattered garrisons alongside the redan, fortified with artillery, at the extreinity of the Cambaio Road j to the south, a line running to Mount Favella and to the dominant Seventh of September bastion. Even though fragmentary, the closed circle of a real and effective siege line had now been drawn. The insurrection was doomed.

CHAPTER X LAST DAYS

I FLOUNDERINGS OF THE VANQUISHED

S

OMETHING then happened that was truly extraordinary and wholly unexpected. The battered enemy now appeared of a sudden to have obtained a new lease on life and began displaying an incredible degree of vigor. Even yet the troops that had faced him from the start of the conflict had not really come to know him; or, rather, they knew him only from the glimpses they had had of him, as an astute foe, slipping away among the maze of dugouts and luring them on, indomitably repelling the most valiant of charges, and without an equal when it came to eluding the most unforeseen of attacks. He was beginning to loom as a hero in their eyes. Hemmed in on all sides by thousands of bayonets, the jagun!;